Leaders in Catholic Education: Dale Ahlquist’s Call from Chesterton

Leaders in Catholic Education: Dale Ahlquist’s Call from Chesterton by Dr. Melissa Mitchell at Word on Fire. A renewal movement has been growing in Catholic education in the United States over the past twenty years. The movement began as a response to the decline of Catholic education that began in the mid-1960s. This period of decline is characterized by a loss of religious identity, a loss of religious teachers and administrators, and the progressive ideology that replaced catechesis in the Church’s tradition. As a result, families and educators began to seek alternatives to restore the unity of faith and reason that is the traditional foundation of Catholic education. Read

The Summer Reading List, 2025 Edition by George Weigel at First Things. Some years ago, a friend teaching at a state university told me that he was offering a course on the history of baseball. I asked him for his syllabus, thinking there might be books on it I’d like to read. “What did you say?” he asked. “Books,” I replied. He laughed and said that if his syllabus included more than one book and one article, no one would register for the course. This is not good for civilization. So, in memory of those halcyon high school days when I was assigned at least five (often very large) books to read each summer, I offer the 2025 edition of my annual Summer Reading List. Read

4 Back to School Ideas Your Kids Will Love by Lindsey Fedyk at Refine. As we near the end of the dog days, it’s time to start gearing up for a return to school. The anticipation of a new school year is an exciting time for children, but may come with some apprehension as well. Help your children feel ready and enthusiastic for their school year with these four back-to-school preparations. Read

Taking Measure of Your Seminar Leadership by Andrew J. Zwerneman at Cana Academy. Given the wide disagreement and occasional confusion about the nature and purpose of seminars on classic texts, how can seminar leaders take measure of how well they are leading them? In order to facilitate a good evaluation, I’ve put together a Seminar Leader’s Self-Examination Chart. Before you head into your next seminar, make an honest evaluation based on the standards for Good Seminars and the deficiencies of Poor Seminars. When you have clarity on the quality of your own leadership, take action by reinforcing what is good and shoring up what is deficient. Read

Florida’s Path to Educational Excellence featuring Vince Verges at Anchored by the Classical Learning Test. On this episode of Anchored, CLT’s Chief Strategy Officer Noah Tyler is joined by Vince Verges, who recently retired from the Florida Department of Education after 31 years in Florida public schools. They discuss how Florida emerged as a national leader in classical education. Vince shares his journey from classroom teacher to serving as the head of Accountability and Assessment at the Florida Department of Education, including his choice to steer away from Common Core standardized testing. They explore the role of virtue in education, particularly in connection to the rise of AI. Listen

Bismarck’s Secret: Strong Families, Catholic Schools Fuel Vocations Boom by Luke Larson at National Catholic Register. In an era of declining vocations to the priesthood in America, the Diocese of Bismarck in North Dakota is helping lead the way to renewal. Among all 175 dioceses in the United States, Bismarck has seen the highest rates of ordination in the country. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate — a Georgetown University research center that provides data on the Church in America — uses the official numbers from each diocese to provide a concrete statistic for measuring this: Catholics per recent diocesan ordination. Read

Ordinary and Heroic Virtue: The Story of Tom Vander Woude featuring Chris Vander Woude at The HeightsCast. In 2008, Tom Vander Woude died saving the life of his youngest son. But this radical self-gift was really the culmination of a quiet life of daily virtue with a heart of faith. Chris Vander Woude, the fifth of Tom and Mary Ellen’s seven sons, now carries the story of his father’s life and death across the country, as well as sharing the process towards canonization that began this year with the assignment of a postulator in Rome. Chris joins us today to speak about fatherhood and the extraordinary man who exemplified it for him. Listen

How Do Kids in Top-Spending States Perform on NAEP? Not as Well as You’d Think by Chad Aldeman at The74. Money matters in education, but it’s no guarantee of student success. Take New York, for example. In its latest “Making the Grade” report, the Education Law Center adjusted school spending figures relative to their regional labor market costs. It gave New York’s school funding system an A for the total amount of money it sent to public schools, a B for the distribution of those funds among schools and an A for the amount of money it spent relative to the state’s overall gross domestic product per capita. Read

Rebuilding Virtue: We Need an Architecture Revival by Ella Yates at Acton Institute. “Beauty will save the world.” With this declaration, Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot affirms his belief in the triumph of the transcendent principles of truth, beauty, and goodness. Despite the ugliness too often seen in the world and the moral corruption that corrupts the minds and acts of men, the belief that beauty is a path to salvation persists. Read

The End of the Essay? Humanities Departments Enter the AI Age by Moira Gleason at National Review. The academic writing process, which makes up the bulk of undergraduate education in the liberal arts and humanities, now stands in the crosshairs of developing artificial intelligence as widely available large language models (LLMs) continue to improve at replicating human thought and spitting out strings of text aggregated from internet resources. The technology stands to greatly improve many facets of research and industry but threatens to leave one educational institution — the undergraduate college essay — in the dust. Read

AI in the Classroom: It Needs More Than Guardrails—It Needs Purpose by Christos Makridis at Institute for Family Studies. Missing from the current conversation is an affirmative vision for what we want AI in education to achieve. Yes, guardrails are needed, but so is a guiding star. AI in education is not just an external force to be fenced in; it is also a tool whose impact will ultimately reflect the values and goals we build into it. The question, then, is not only “How do we prevent harm?” but also “How do we design AI to actively promote the well-being and growth of students?” Read

The Crisis of Liberal Education by Lee Trepanier at Law & Liberty. Liberal education is in a state of perpetual crisis. Over the past two years, the University of Tulsa’s Honors Director, Jennifer Frey, built a program where students read “thousands of pages of difficult material every semester” and participated in “small, Socratic seminars” marked by vigorous and civil debates about ideas. But in a recent New York Times editorial, Frey recounts how the newly installed provost decided that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” To save money, distinctive programs were cut, staff eliminated, and a new mandate―increased class sizes―was issued. Read

Throwback Thursday

The Remedy for “Canceling” and Division: Catholic Education by Daniel Guernsey at The Catholic Thing on May 19, 2021. Authentic Catholic education does not cancel culture; it elevates, redeems, and transmits culture. It seeks out and celebrates truth, beauty, and goodness, wherever they are found – and if they are missing, Catholic education points that out as well. The transcendentals are not bound by culture, time, race, or gender. They do not flourish equally at all times, among all members of all cultures, but can always be celebrated in God’s Creation and the best human works. Read