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Home Schooling Saved a Dying Church

"Home Schooling Saved a Dying Church" by Robert A. Sirico at The Wall Street Journal

Jan 16, 2025

"When I became pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2012, I inherited a parish on the brink of collapse. Established in 1904 by Polish immigrants, the parish had seen its once-thriving community move to the suburbs or abandon its faith. What remained was a crumbling rectory, a neglected church and a school with 68 students, down from about 900 in the mid-1960s. The parish was slated to merge with another, and the bishop gave me the option to shutter the school. I decided to investigate before making any decisions."


Home Schooling Saved a Dying Church by Robert A. Sirico at The Wall Street Journal. When I became pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2012, I inherited a parish on the brink of collapse. Established in 1904 by Polish immigrants, the parish had seen its once-thriving community move to the suburbs or abandon its faith. What remained was a crumbling rectory, a neglected church and a school with 68 students, down from about 900 in the mid-1960s. The parish was slated to merge with another, and the bishop gave me the option to shutter the school. I decided to investigate before making any decisions. Read

 

6-Year-Olds in England Get a Phonics Check. American Kids Should Get One, Too by Chad Aldeman at The74. Starting in 2012, the Brits started giving a phonics check to all 6-year-olds. At the end of their first year of school (equivalent to kindergarten), kids are given a list of 40 words to read out loud…Teachers listen to each student read the words and then score them on how many they decode correctly. Children have to get at least 80% correct to pass. Not that much happens with the results…But parents get to see their child’s result, and kids who fail the test have to retake it the next year…In this light, England’s phonics check is a light-touch intervention with relatively low stakes. But it has driven dramatic increases in student performance. Read

 

Classical Education’s Thriving Counterculture by Mark Bauerlein at Modern Age. Shortly before Christmas, I’m in an eleventh-grade classroom at Cardinal Kung Academy in Stamford, Connecticut...Founded on a classical curriculum that features lots of Latin, Great Books, and the Magisterium, the school opened in 2018 with twenty students in two grades, ninth and tenth, and now has students in the sixth through twelfth grades. Its co-founder Nancy Grimm attended Thomas Aquinas College, as did her husband and siblings, and she wanted to create a middle- and high-school version of that formation. She—much like the growing ranks of parents and teachers who have started classical schools—reviewed public offerings nearby and found the learning there woefully inadequate. Read

 

Where the Magic Doesn’t Happen by Andy Crouch at After Babel. As the digital age drowns us in exponentially increasing rates of new content—most of which is trivial and ephemeral—it is becoming clear that almost everything more than a few years old gets buried by incoming content. This is a serious problem for the continuity of any civilization if most writing and ideas propagate laterally (from peer-to-peer) and very little propagates longitudinally, from generation-to-generation. Our godlike technology may be cutting us off from the accumulated and hard-won wisdom of humanity. Read

 

St. Thomas More’s Example of Maintaining a Strong Family by Fr. Michael Rennier at Aleteia. Though an important government official, noted writer, and intellectual, St. Thomas More was deeply devoted to his family…His diligence as a father was, in its own way, an example of heroic virtue. At the very least, it provides an example that all of us today can benefit from. In the midst of a busy life, he always made time for family. Read

 

Don’t Give In: Eliminate Cell Phones in Schools by Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman at Cana Academy. In a recent lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarized the argument of his new book, The Anxious Generation. He argues, “Play-based childhood, which is what we’ve had for literally millions of years because we’re mammals and all mammals play when they’re young…the play-based childhood faded out gradually in this country between 1980-2010. And then all of sudden in the blink of an eye, the phone-based childhood swept in between 2010-2015.” This “phone-based childhood” occurred with the advent of smartphones, social media, and high-speed internet when all of that was put into children’s hands and pockets all day long—much of it viewed in isolation. Read

 

Great Poetry Should Be Learned by Heart by Francis Phillips at Mercator. Great poetry should not be the preserve of the few but the birthright of all children. For poetry is the language of the soul (think of the Psalms) and we all have souls. This is a challenging statement for an age of spiritual mediocrity, the age in which we live now, but it matters urgently – if only to remind people that the language of beauty still exists and that if children are exposed to it through the words, the cadences, the rhythms and the imagery of traditional poems they will have a glimpse of the eternal which they will never forget. Read

 

Throwback Thursday

 

Top 10 Reasons for Studying Latin by Cheryl Lowe at Memoria Press on May 1, 2012. In this day of computers, and the triumph of science and technology, when there is so much to learn and so little time, why study a dead language? Why not study something practical and useful? Like Spanish, for instance. While we agree the study of Spanish is a very good thing, what I propose to show you here is that there is no subject more useful, more practical, and more valuable than Latin. Read


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