By Jude Michael
The Catholic Bishop of Awka Diocese, Most Rev Dr Paulinus Chukwuemeka Ezeokafor, has appealed to parents to embrace Catholic education to get the moral aspect of their children and wards’ lives right.
Bishop Ezeokafor made the appeal while speaking during the Silver Jubilee Anniversary of Tansi International College, Awka, recently.
Ezeokafor, who expressed the belief that holistic education of a child would as a matter of priority, take adequate care of moral aspects of the life of a child, emphasized the reason for Catholic education.
He said, ‘Catholic education centres on integral formation of a human being. This is because, any human being created in the image and likeness of God has two aspects, the spiritual and the material.
‘Catholic education works on both sides, academically to make sure that a child passes exams after working for it.
‘108 students are to be confirmed today. If they were to be in certain schools in some areas, nobody would talk about the confirmation.
‘So, I want to warn parents; if you only emphasize on the academic life of your child, you are breeding criminals,’ Ezeokafor stressed.
‘Those yahoo yahoo boys and the rest of them, are very intelligent, clever, smart, and do things excellently well; but as first-class criminals.
‘Catholic education dusts all these immoralities out of children’s lives by Catholic teachings and morals.
‘I heard about the proposed 18 years age limit for university admissions; it is very good; I have nothing against it because it can get people extraordinarily intelligent about morality and academic work.
‘In fact, if you blend the two, especially through Catholic education, you will have useful people.
‘So, I want parents and guardians to see that their children are well trained.
‘When you are making choices about schools your children should go, consider also about the faith for character,’ the Bishop said, stressing that character was more important than learning.
‘This is because character models whatever you do in the area of your academic learning and pursuit,’ Bishop Ezeokafor said.
The Bishop, who also noted that the education of a child was not only the responsibility of school teachers, charged parents to take care of the spiritual lives of their children to enable them to have the fear of God early in life.
He stressed that parents had it as a fundamental responsibility to initiate their children into what it took to know and serve God at home.
