Survey: Homeschooled Adults Are More Religious and Less Anxious

Survey: Homeschooled Adults Are More Religious and Less Anxious by Anna Kaladish Reynolds at The Federalist. A recent report from the Cardus Education Survey analyzed educational, economic, mental health, civic, family, and faith status for American adults who were homeschooled and found a range of outcomes within a diverse population. With homeschooling on the rise, the report highlights that people in a variety of demographics opt for homeschooling, either short-term or long-term. Read

This Is No Time to Go Wobbly on Screen Use by Clare Morell at The Wall Street Journal. Regarding Lucy Foulkes’s essay “Stop Panicking Over Teens and Social Media”, it may not be time to panic, but it is time to pay attention. The foundation of a well-rounded life is built on diverse, real-world experiences. These help foster resilience, leadership, teamwork and face-to-face social skills—qualities that risk being stunted when screen time takes precedence. Read

School Cellphone Bans Emerge in Red and Blue States as Usage Concerns Grow by Jack Birle at The Washington Examiner. Cellphone usage has exploded in the 21st century, and schools have implemented a variety of regulations to control students being on the devices, but now, bans are sweeping the country. The use of cellphones in schools has only grown, and for teachers, it has become a significant problem. As lawmakers push forward laws empowering teachers and school administrators to restrict cellphone use in the classroom, here is why they are being supported and where they’re being implemented. Read

Study: Relying on Artificial Intelligence Reduces Critical Thinking Skills by Paul Bois at Breitbart. The study, conducted by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft, found that people who use AI regularly for basic, routine tasks will lose their ability for complex critical thinking. The study focused on what it referred to as 319 “knowledge workers,” meaning professionals who deal in problem-solving of some kind, and found some rather alarming results on the effects of AI. Read

The Retreat From Euclid And America’s Great Math Collapse by Lance Izumi at ClassicalEd Review. When average people think about classical education, they tend to think about students reading the great works of Western civilization such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Those same people probably do not think about mathematics and its classical origins, yet it is the movement away from mathematics’ classical heritage that has helped cause the collapse of mathematical learning in America’s schools. One of the most important foundational elements of mathematics is the standard algorithm, which is a step-by-step process that will solve a class of mathematical problems. Read

By Seeing the Limits of History We See More of It by Andrew J. Zwerneman at Cana Academy. We should all be alarmed that, increasingly, young Americans “don’t know much” about history. The problem, however, is more than a lack of knowledge. It is a lack of understanding, a failure to learn about their humanity from those who came before them. In a nutshell, for a lot of American students, there seems little reason to study history. Many students in typical schools misconstrue history as an amorphous chronology, a mere temporal line of one darn thing after another. This perception is due in no small measure to painfully boring textbooks: long on the qualities of a timeline, short on quality narrative. Read

On Teaching Men featuring Dr. John Cuddeback at HeightsCast. At our 2024 Teaching Conference, Dr. John Cuddeback of Christendom College unpacked what boys need from their fathers and teachers in order to grow into the men they truly desire to be. And what boys desire, he argues, comes from their God-given nature: one that resonates with fatherhood, moral character, and the ability to speak truth. Listen

CatholicVote Joins Push for Federal School Choice Bill by Rachel Quackenbush at CatholicVote. CatholicVote joined a coalition of more than 50 organizations urging Congress to pass the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA). The bill would establish a federal scholarship tax credit designed to significantly expand education options for K-12 students from lower- to middle-income families. “We the undersigned represent the largest coalition ever assembled in support of a federal scholarship tax credit that would directly empower K-12 parents of up to two million students to choose the best school or education service for their own children,” the coalition stated in a Feb. 11 letter addressed to congressional leaders. Read

Red States Have Seen Less Learning Loss by Michael Hartney and Paul E. Peterson at EducationNext. Student reading and math performance nationwide in 2024 remains substantially below pre-pandemic levels in both 4th and 8th grade. The same is true in all three groups of states. But the downward slope is considerably steeper for students residing in blue states than for those in red states, with those in purple states falling somewhere in between (see figure). Each of the reported differences between red and blue states in the slope of the trend from 2019 to 2024 is statistically significant. Read

7 NYC Catholic Schools Announce Closings in Past Month as Experts Blame Skyrocketing Tuition, Loss of Religion by Katherine Donlevy at New York Post. Catholic schools across New York City are falling like dominoes thanks to skyrocketing tuition prices and a deteriorating connection to religion, according to experts and dismal statistics. In just the past month, a shocking seven institutions announced they would be shutting their doors for good at the end of the academic year — following 13 others that fell to the same fate in the years since the pandemic, battered by overall enrollment plummeting a jaw-dropping 23%. The newly announced closures mean 12% of the Catholic schools that operated in the five boroughs in 2020 will no longer exist by the summer. Read

College-Bound? Try These Catholic Summer Programs by Cardinal Newman Society Staff. A faithful Catholic education can prepare students not only for a career, but also for life. Whether or not you plan to attend a Catholic college, a summer program at one of the faithful colleges recommended in The Newman Guide can be enriching and will give you a taste of the benefits of a Catholic education. Read

Throwback Thursday

St. Edith Stein’s 5 Tips for Religious Education by Susanna Spencer at National Catholic Register on December 10, 2023. Once a child reaches the age of reason, he or she is ready to consciously embrace the faith. St. Edith explains that the goal of the religious instructor, as a parent or teacher, should be “to establish a direct, firm relationship to the world of faith, one which endures after her instruction ceases and which resists dangerous effects counteracting from another direction.” She gives several ideas on how to go about establishing this relationship. Read