Abstract

At all levels, Catholic education institutions prioritize the enhancement of ‘Catholic values’ within their educational contexts (Miller, 2006). This has been highly emphasized in evolving Catholic educational philosophies over the years owing to its link to the ‘pastoral mission’ extended to all Catholic educational institutions by the Catholic Church (Hambulo, 2016; Grace, 2002). Despite there being various educational policy directives advocating for strengthening of the catholicity of Catholic education institutions in the philosophy of Catholic education, it is evident that they do not seem to adequately stress the fundamental aspect of particularly the importance of ‘formal orientation of teachers’ within such institutions as a reliable solution to their current general weakened catholicity worldwide. In line with the aforementioned, Papa (2008), posits that ‘formal orientation’ enables new employees to receive fundamental information about the institution they are about to join and introduces them to some institutional fundamentals, objectives, policies, vision, mission, work culture and others. Therefore, how an institution handles ‘formal orientation’ determines its overall success or failure rate. Drawing information from a 2021 study entitled ‘The Status-quo regarding the Formal Orientation of Novice Teachers and its Implication on the Catholicity of Selected Catholic Secondary Schools in Livingstone District, Zambia’, the paper show-cases the relationship between the status-quo regarding formal orientation of new teachers and the catholicity of Catholic secondary schools in Zambia’s Livingstone District’ and generally argues that the lack of a proper structured formal orientation programme of new teachers in Catholic secondary schools of Livingstone District is the reason for their weakened catholicity.

Keywords: Formal, Orientation, Teacher, Catholicity, Catholic