The Classroom Reality

By Alexandra A. Seno - Newsweek
Thursday, August 14, 2008 - Web Link
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August 14, 2008

Over the past four centuries, the Jesuits have built a formidable global education enterprise. The storied, 19,000-plus-strong Society of Jesus, as the organization is formally known, is today the world's biggest Roman Catholic male religious order. It is also one of the world's largest private-school operators, with 2.9 million students, mostly in developing countries. Indeed, in January, at one of the first masses following his election, the Jesuit leader, Father Adolfo Nicolás, a Spanish priest who has spent most of his life in Asia, underscored the group's main focus on helping "the poor, the marginalized and the excluded." Though he didn't say it then, to achieve that goal, the Jesuits are accelerating the effort to educate the rich in developing countries about their poor.

The Society, which runs U.S. universities like Georgetown and Boston College, is most famous for educating key historical figures in power capitals—including Hapsburg emperors, French literary giants Molière and Voltaire, and the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. But with a new superior general in Nicolás, who has made migrant workers and globalization's "new poor" a career focus, the Jesuits' work in emerging markets has taken on a fresh urgency. One of the order's most important education missions is the cultivation of empathy among the haves in poor countries for the have-nots.

In addition to establishing schools for underprivileged children, the Society also runs top private schools, attended by the children of some of the world's most influential leaders. Through these institutions the Jesuits aim to uphold academic standards while actively preparing graduates to be agents of social change. Father Bienvenido Nebres, a member of the board of trustees at Georgetown and the president of the elite Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, believes that quality education in a population with a wide income gap presents a unique set of challenges. "The poor are not an isolated group," he says. "In the U.S. you have poor sections in a city but the rest is pretty OK. In the developing world, it is the other way around because the majority is poor. Thinking of helping the poor in terms of soup kitchens or tutoring cannot be enough. You have to change the status quo."