The $10 Billion Rise Of Classical Christian Education

The $10 Billion Rise Of Classical Christian Education by Sarah Hernholm at Forbes. A 2,500-year-old educational approach is quietly disrupting the $750 billion K-12 education market, creating opportunities for investors, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to pay attention to emerging talent pipelines. Classical Christian Education (CCE) has expanded from a niche movement to a significant market force, with over 677,500 students enrolled across 1,551 institutions for the 2023-2024 school year. Projections indicate this figure could reach 1.4 million by 2035—representing billions in tuition revenue, thousands of teaching jobs, and a growing cohort of graduates with distinctive skill sets entering the workforce. Read

An Introduction to Classical Education by Emily Harrison at ClassicalEd Review. Classical education has its own language. Unfamiliar words and phrases such as rigor, trivium, quadrivium, rhetoric, grammar stage, virtue, paideia, and poll-parrot abound. Rare is the classical school who boasts successful transmission of this language to parents. Christopher Perrin’s 45-page booklet, An Introduction to Classical Education: A Guide for Parents, aims to do just that. Read

The Artist Goes To School by Andrew de Sa at Studio de Sa. Some of the most enjoyable and meaningful work I have done has been commissions for schools. I’d like to explore why that is by relating a few common traits of the schools I have worked with. I’ll finish by sharing the story of delivering a recent work of art to St Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, MD. Read

Around the World with the Cardinals: Geography Through the Conclave by Theresa Civantos Barber at Aleteia. The papal conclave brings together cardinals from across the globe, making it a great opportunity to teach children about world geography. This huge historic event offers families and schools a rare chance to explore countries and cultures with the personal connection of shared faith. Here are a few ways to learn about the geography of the conclave and the universal reach of our Catholic faith. Read

Teaching Children the Real Presence by Valerie Parzyck at Catholic365. Each spring, parishes celebrate a First Communion Mass with a new group of children. This is a special day for them. They are donned in their finest clothes while participating in the liturgy, and a photographer snaps a picture of each child receiving Jesus for the first time.  Yet a Pew Research Center study done in 2019 showed that 69% of Catholics believed the bread and wine to be “symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ” rather than the True Presence. What happened? Read

Despite Grade Inflation, Family Still Matters For Student Performance by Nicholas Zill at Institute for Family Studies. Despite the ballooning number of students getting stellar grades on their report cards, those being raised by their married birth parents are still more likely to get mostly A grades than those being raised by single parents, stepparents, cohabiting birth parents, or other relative or non-relative guardians. This is so even after taking account of parent-education and family-income differences across family types, as well as differences in their racial and ethnic composition. Read

End of the Year Evaluations by Mary Frances Loughran at Cana Academy. Grading in general, but end-of-year evaluations in particular, are often a source of frustration and anxiety for teachers, students, and parents. It all just feels so final and definitive and, at times, disappointing. The following are tips for writing helpful evaluations—helpful to the teacher, the student, and parents. Read

Literature Wakes to the Light of Easter Season by Joseph Pearce at National Catholic Register. As we bask in the glory of the Easter season, celebrating the Resurrection, it is a good time to consider how themes of resurrection have been a recurrent feature of literature throughout the ages. A good place to start is to see the Resurrection in terms of eucatastrophe, a word which Tolkien invented to indicate the sudden joyous turn in a story which leads to the consolation of the happy ending. Read

Texas Goes Big on School Choice as Governor Signs Voucher Bill by Lowell Cauffiel at Breitbart. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill Saturday that will create a $1 billion school choice program, the largest initial funding for a program of its kind in the nation. The signing took place outdoors shortly after 2:00 p.m. at the governor’s mansion in Austin in front of a crowd of supporters that included a large group of applauding students behind the governor. Read

Study: Private School Choice Makes Even Public Schoolers More Likely To Earn College Degrees by Christopher Jacobs at The Federalist. As school choice expands around the country, so do its positive effects. Because the modern school choice movement, which began in the 1990s in Milwaukee, has operated in many places for a decade or more, studies can examine the effects of educational choice on children’s long-term outcomes. Read

New Catholic High School Coming to Wake County in 2028 by Keaton Eberly at CBS17.com. Cardinal Gibbons High School is collaborating with the Diocese of Raleigh to welcome students to another Catholic-focused institution, school leaders announced Thursday…Cardinal Gibbons administrators said this marks a significant expansion of Catholic high schools in the region, as this initiative aligns with the Diocese’s long-term vision to broaden access to quality, faith-based secondary education. Read

Throwback Thursday

Awakening the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian at The Imaginative Conservative on October 29, 2023. The great fairy tales and fantasy stories capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of struggles between good and evil where characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. The great stories avoid didacticism and supply the imagination with important symbolic information about the shape of our world and appropriate responses to its inhabitants. Read