
Jan 23, 2025
Catholic Schools: Boom to Bust to . . . Renewal? by Michael Ortner at Word on Fire. America’s first Catholic schools date back to at least 1606, when Franciscan friars opened a school in what is now St. Augustine, Florida. In 1782, St. Mary’s in Philadelphia became the first parochial school in the United States, creating a tradition of Catholic education that proliferated in the 1800s and eventually peaked during the 1965–1966 school year, when approximately 5.7 million K–12 students (over 10 percent of all school-age children in the US) attended more than 12,000 Catholic schools. Parents across all income levels and from a wide range of backgrounds chose Catholic schools for their children. The academic, moral, and spiritual formation provided by Catholic schools was perceived as at least equal to, and in some ways better than, what they could expect to receive at the free neighborhood public schools. By the numbers and despite long odds, Catholic education in the United States became a huge success story! Read
What is Wonder? by Andrew J. Zwerneman at Cana Academy. Critics of classical education often dismiss the terms we use either because they find the terms arcane or because they are attached to ways of thinking or teaching that refuse admission to anything that might interrupt their project. Among the targeted terms is “wonder.” We claim that learning begins in wonder, we claim that a major objective in liberal education is to cultivate a sense of wonder, and we gauge our student’s intellectual freedom in some measure by the sense of wonder they exhibit. Read
Make Just One Change by John Roche at ClassicalEd Review. It is obvious to anyone who has worked with children that asking questions is an intimate part of being human, and as classical educators, one of our tasks is to make deliberate and consistent what is already innate in the child. As this is true for grammar, logic, and rhetoric, so too is it true for generating questions, especially for class seminars. But this is not easy, as many students bring tangential or closed-ended questions, leaving many teachers to wait on having seminars until the students are “ready” or at a “logic stage.” What Make Just One Change does is provide the teacher with a method that that offers the student, regardless of age, a way to be deliberate and consistent in asking great questions. Read
Not Ashamed of Catholic Schooling: Interview with Kairos Montessori Founder by Thomas Edwards at The Catholic Herald. Henry Wigan is the co-founder of Mustard Seed + Partners, a private equity firm that supports companies in creating solutions for the most significant social and environmental challenges. However, a project that is perhaps closer to his heart, which he has led alongside his wife Candida, is the founding of Kairos Montessori in 2017—an all-through school located in the picturesque fishing town of Cascais, just outside Lisbon. Montessori pedagogy, the work of the 20th-century polymath Maria Montessori, is the guiding principle for the curriculum of the school. But the beating heart of the school is its Catholic faith. Read
SCOTUS to Hear Maryland Opt-Out Case by Haley Strack at National Review. The Supreme Court of the United States will take up Mahmoud v. Taylor, the case in which parents are fighting for their right to opt children out of gender and sexuality lessons. Becket Fund, the law firm representing parents against the liberal behemoth of a school district, Montgomery County Public Schools, announced on Friday that SCOTUS “will hear a case that could protect notice and opt-out rights for parents in Montgomery County, Maryland. A diverse group of religious parents is asking the Court to restore their right to opt their children out of storybooks that push one-sided ideology on gender and sexuality.” Read
Maine Doubles Down Again on Discrimination Against Religious Schools by Charles J. Russo at The Catholic World Report. Anti-religious discrimination continues unabated in Maine despite the Supreme Court’s June 21, 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin. In Carson, the Court reasoned that state officials could not exclude faith-based schools from Maine’s “tuitioning” program, which aids families in rural districts lacking public high schools. The Court, in the third of a trilogy of cases discussed in my earlier posting, extending the parameters of religious liberty in education, held that the program’s “nonsectarian” requirement banning faith-based schools from participating in the “tuitioning” program violated the Free Exercise Clause. Why? Because it was neither neutral toward religion nor did it allow parents to send their children to the schools of their choice. Read
The Idea of a Catholic University featuring Dr. Peter Kilpatrick at The HeightsCast. All the first universities were—St. Thomas Aquinas would tell us—Catholic ones. But in this modern day, it takes intentionality to maintain the rich tradition of Catholic education. In a talk recorded for HeightsCast, Dr. Peter Kilpatrick, president of The Catholic University of America, spoke to families at The Heights about what it means to be a Catholic university. He first consults the experts: Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, John Paul the Great, and Pope Benedict XVI. He then offers examples from his own career in school leadership, and how to put the exhortations of popes and saints into action on campus. Listen
Throwback Thursday
Why America’s Kids Need To Learn From the Founders via “Classical Schooling” by Dr. Kevin D. Roberts at The Heritage Foundation on May 20, 2024. From 2012 to 2022, the share of American children not attending government-run schools rose from 9% to 13%. That’s roughly 2 million students opting into charter schools, homeschooling or other school options. For advocates of education freedom, this sea change comes as no surprise. The steady wave of school-choice policies enacted throughout the United States in recent years created more options for students, and the eye-opening revelations that came along with COVID school lockdowns encouraged parents to take advantage of them. This same dynamic sparked the development of new types of education, including the resurrection of an old and forgotten approach that made America great—and possible—in the first place: classical schooling. Read