Introduction

My salutation and the introduction to this presentation will consist in just a few words. Thank you for having invited me. It is a privilege and an honor to be here in this assembly with you. I am moved and impressed by the atmosphere here.

Considering the quality of the service which you all deserve, I am sorry that Fr. Gabriel Codina, Fr. General's Secretary for Education, has not been able to be your speaker for this topic.

Above all, I feel a great desire to communicate with you in order to share as much as possible the great enthusiasm and passion which Jesuit Educators have for our work and for that which we wish to do in the field of education.

Furthermore, knowing that you are interested in, and willing to collaborate with this profound means of evangelization is extraordinarily stimulating. For all of this, I thank you.

I don't think that it would be worthwhile overwhelming you with statistics concerning what the Society of Jesus is doing in the area of education. Precisely in these days Fr. Gabriel Codina is tabulating the latest data received from all of our formal and informal educational institutions, throughout the entire world, and the people who work in them. You can ask him for this data in order to have a more complete vision and better understanding of what we are doing and what we are not doing.

An analytical reading of these educational statistics, if it is not superficial and naive, reveals important data concerning criteria, options, strategies, tendencies, possibilities and absences.

The fact that a little more than one fourth of the Jesuits in the world are working in the educational apostolate, and the fact that this apostolic sector is the one which includes the greatest number of Jesuits are two facts which reveal that the body of Society of Jesus thinks - as Fr. General said in Caracas in January of this year - that education is "a privileged means for helping souls", and that "today, withdrawing from the area of education would be completely irresponsible on the part of the Society of Jesus".

The number of primary and secondary schools, institutes of higher learning and universities which dedicate themselves to men and women students of all social and economic levels, from the poor and marginated to the intellectual investigators, professionals and businessmen at the best universities, along with being present on all continents and even in countries located in the so called "three worlds" that are in a state of conflict and involve high risks, all of this reveals a strategic vision, an unconditional vocation of service, missionary audacity, the power of penetration in diverse classes of communities and cultures, and the universality of our mission.

Having overcome the crisis which occurred in our educational institutions during the sixties and seventies, the Society of Jesus has understood, as have the sociologists and those who build societies, that education is a fundamental good and a strategy for which there is no substitute, and it has rediscovered the potential for the promotion of faith and justice and for evangelization which exists it.

In today's world, education is becoming so irreplaceable that the excessive demands and expectations which are placed upon it have put education itself in crisis.

When communities begin to have democratic problems and don't know how to capacitate their citizens, they ask education to take charge of political and democratic education. When threats to the ecology emerge, they assign to us educators the task of ecological education. When AIDS extends itself uncontainably, they demand sexual and health education from us. When drugs and alcohol destroy young people, they assign to us the task of education to prevent drug addiction. When getting a job becomes more difficult, they demand from us "work oriented" education and capacitation. When corruption contaminates political atmospheres and social and economic power, they beg us to work with the students and give them ethical and civic education, etc.

Systematic, institutionalized education has been converted into a wild card, a bag full of all kinds of assignments. This demands that educators prepare their students for everything, that they understand everything, and that they contribute in an effective way to resolve everything. Education is being converted into the resource for expectations.

What I mean to say by making this commentary is that a quantitative analysis is pushing us towards a qualitative analysis. Not only are there many of us working much and in many places; in addition, societies are demanding more and more of us. They are assigning to us more and more tasks that are more complex and important. We are no longer instructors or teachers. Now we are educators which also signifies that above all, we are formators and capacitators for life.

II. A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF JESUIT EDUCATION

I referred you to the data bank of our General Secretary for statistical information and the quantitative dimension of Jesuit education. In order to offer you elements for a qualitative analysis, I now refer you to the text of the last General Congregation and to the addresses, commentaries and letters which Fr. General has been writing.

The General Congregation evaluated what we have been doing in education starting with the elaboration and putting into practice of the following two documents: "Characteristics of the education offered by the Society of Jesus" (1986) and the "Paradigm of Ignatian Pedagogy" (1993). These documents inspire and motivate our work and they are the key for understanding the renovation and the actual validity of education in the Society. The General Congregation recognizes that:

1. "many Jesuits and lay persons have initiated and carried out an important apostolic renovation".
2. "our educational institutions have opened themselves to an ever growing number of students from groups that are economically weak".
3. "the quality of education has improved according to the principles announced in the educational documents of the Society".
4. "collaboration between Jesuits and lay persons has increased considerably".
5. "our schools have become platforms from which we insert ourselves within the community... and even within the poor and marginated of the community".
6. "we have shared our educational heritage with those who have asked us for it".
7. "the educational apostolate of the Society has been notably enriched by the contribution made by centers for popular education which have been created in rural and urban areas in countries which are in the process of development".

The 34th General Congregation "is pleased to note these advances and urges that they be carried out". In addition, it exhorts continual growth by means of a series of strategic recommendations such as:

1. "the careful selection of directors and professors, Jesuits and non-Jesuits".
2. "an adequate formation in Ignatian charisma and pedagogy, especially for those who will occupy positions of responsibility".
3. "dedication to primary and grade schools" since "these kinds of schools are very important" and they "constitute one of the most effective services which we can offer, especially to the poor".
4. "collaboration between centers for popular education and high schools, universities, and social centers".

The positive evaluation which the 34th General Congregation gave to the educational work of the Society has been confirmed in the document called "Complementary Norms" (277) in which the following is stated with great clarity:

"The educational apostolate, in all of its scope, should be esteemed as of great importance among the ministries of the Society for the continuation of our actual mission in the service of the faith, which springs from justice, and as something especially recommended by the Church in our times. The reason is that if this work is carried out in the light of our mission today, it contributes in a vital way to "the full and integral liberation of the human being, which introduces him/her into the participation in the life of God Himself".

In the General Congregation and in the Complementary Norms, we educators have received concrete orientations and recommendations to confront our work in interaction with other dimensions of our evangelization, such as ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, social pastoral work, and the evangelization of cultures, integrating in all of this collaboration and

co-responsability with lay men and women.

III. OPENING THE FRONTIERS OF JESUIT EDUCATION

This rapid review of our education, based on official documents of the Society, with a brief quantitative and qualitative analysis, is not sufficient in order to evaluate what is happening and in order to open our frontiers.

What we are doing is insufficient and is deficient. We need deeper, professional reassessments in order to be able to satisfy the needs and expectations of those who send their children to the Society's educational institutions, in order to assure ourselves that we are an adequate response to present day demands, in order to confirm that we are moving in the direction of the "magis", along the way of "Ignatian excellence" and in order to feel that we are apt and efficient instruments in the hands of God for the construction of the Kingdom..

We who are educators, lay and Jesuit, in the institutions of the Society of Jesus need to continue completing, deepening and developing the Ignatian pedagogical paradigm. The published document is a provocative and motivating trial document, but it is still imperfect and in a germinal state.

Educators in general, not only those of the Society, still dedicate the major part of our reflection and investigation to studying the problems of our students and of our schools almost exclusively from the perspectives of psychology.

We have not shaken loose from the so-called "tradition of performance". We analyze what happens in the educational processes and in the processes of teaching and learning with ingenuousness and we isolate them, as Apple would say, "without untangling the complexities of daily interactions within the school." Being Ignatian, we still haven't learned to tie these internal dynamics to the cultural, social, ideological, political and economic context.

We must overcome the vision of our schools as ambits where we seek almost exclusively to maximize the performance of individual students.

The social and sociological pedagogy of education do not find sufficient echo in our professional way of doing things, nor do they encounter resonance in the present text of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. I think that much reflection remains to be done concerning the role of the school in society and that this reflection should be centered on structural and political analyses. We need to view our schools in a more structural, cultural and social way.

Some of us are convinced that as educators we can, and should, be not only capacitators of students for life, servants of faith and promoters of justice, but also we should be true "builders of society". This implies a new role for educators and a professional preparation which incorporates contributions of social pedagogy to our educational task.

The formation of a critical sense in our students, which traditionally has had clear antecedents in the Society in teaching and learning how to think, today requires a more subtle pedagogy, connected to the riches of reflection in spirituality and Ignatian pedagogy. Why is this so?

We ourselves, and our students, are being enveloped in the subtle "nets and chains" of the neo-conservativism of post modernity, whether it comes from the hands of capitalist neo-liberalism or from any other suspect ideology.

From the hands of the means of social communication, especially commercial television, it is normal to see human suffering converted into a naked spectacle, inch by inch, on a daily basis. It is normal that looking attentively at human violence, at human beings against human beings, and with frivolous motives, becomes part of our entertainment in the home.

Stating that every day there are more and more impoverished brothers no longer impacts us and we could even interpret as a triumph the fact that the "option for the poor" has been converted into a conservative objective and an explicit proposition of institutions of the World Bank that are essentially capitalist, when in reality this is an empty victory.

How can we educate today in order to overcome poverty? What should education contribute to social justice? What ways of learning knowledge, attitudes, processes, methods, and values should we promote and try to achieve? What abilities and capacities?

In some educational institutions of the Society of Jesus, in some countries, they have managed to define the profile of an ideal graduate, measure technically how many indicators they achieve and rectify previous educational processes in order to achieve them. But there are still many educational institutions where work is carried out empirically, without theoretical frameworks nor a developed educational philosophy, without paradigms nor defined educational projects which nourish the work for all of its potentials.

The process of renovation of the Society's education has begun and is in good health. It has achieved excellent objectives, but there is still much to be done. Its frontiers are too close.

We have to dilate them, open them, incorporating in our apostolic work of evangelization by means of education the richness of an intelligent dialogue concerning the relations between faith and reason, faith and mature affectivity, faith and science, faith and knowledge, faith and life.

We should open them, passing with more professionalism to the other side, where we can encounter the resources which social pedagogy, educational sociology, and micro and macro policies of education can offer us.

The "Characteristics of Jesuit Education" and the "Paradigm of Ignatian Pedagogy" are being enriched by very important experiences and with studies which will enlighten even more this first and genial intuition.

With the work of all, and if you decide to work in this area with enthusiasm, with the mystique and the spirit which animates you, the Society's education in these decades will leave a deep imprint not only on the beneficiaries of our institutions, but also on the shelf of significant contributions to the history of education.