Catholic Schools and Learning How to See

Catholic Schools and Learning How to See by Andrew Shivone at The Catholic Thing. I recently attended a professional baseball game in Texas. The game was played in a brand-new, multi-billion-dollar stadium that possesses every amenity one could imagine…What struck me, however, was how hard it was to watch the game. Unless the ball was actively in play, the video boards and speakers were constantly either “entertaining” the crowd or selling a product. After the game, I was reminded of a small but insightful essay by philosopher Josef Pieper, “Learning How to See Again,” in his book Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. There, he makes the point that the incessant onslaught of images and noise dulls our sensitivity to reality. He suggests two remedies that I think are especially valuable for Catholic schools today. Read

Don’t Learn to Code, Learn to Think and Adapt by Kristian Fors at Minding the Campus. The world is changing quickly. In the 2010s, computer science was considered one of the most “marketable” majors. Nowadays, it has an increasingly high unemployment rate. Philosophy on the other hand, once the caricature of a “useless” major, is now being praised by people like Marco Argenti, the CIO of Goldman Sachs, who stated in April 2024 that future engineers should study philosophy as a supplement to traditional engineering coursework in order to be able to develop “a crisp mental model around a problem” and “debate a stubborn AI.” Read

Vergil & the Chatbots by Dr. Anthony J. Fredette at Hearth and Field. The opposite of chatting with an A.I. ghost is reading literature written in Latin. If the truth of this claim is not immediately obvious, dear reader, allow me to explain. It has to do with the purposes for which human beings use language. Read

St. Augustine’s Prescription for Catholic Schools: Conversion, Not Just Programs by Brendan Towell at National Catholic Register. In recent decades, Catholic education has been caught in a cycle of reform and reaction, marked by enrollment strategies, marketing language, curriculum tweaks and the search for more effective technology and techniques. These efforts are often well-intentioned, but many fail to confront the deeper disorder: the modern crisis of desire. Read

Other University Presidents are Dismantling the Humanities. One is Teaching Them Instead. by Paul Weinhold at ClassicalEd Review. Dr. Jonathan Sanford, President of the University of Dallas, taught a course on the Philosophy of the Human Person to undergraduate students on their Rome campus this Summer. In that course, he engaged students in the same kind of Socratic questioning and deep engagement with classic texts that characterize of the Core Curriculum…Their guides for the exploration of these questions were some of the greatest minds who ever lived: Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine. This kind of academic leadership is, unfortunately, rather rare in higher education. But at the University of Dallas, it’s not unusual. Read

4 Mistakes in Teaching the Fine Arts by Andrew J. Ellison at Cana Academy. School leaders and teachers in the world of classical education all seem to agree that the fine arts—music, painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture—must have a strong presence in their schools. Against the degraded tastes of the pop-culture industry and the wasteland of academicized, postmodern art, so it goes, the classical school must immerse students in the beautiful. But what should actually be done with the fine arts in schools? As usual, there are more ways to miss the mark than to hit it. Let’s examine four of the worst. Read

Teaching the History of our “Strange New World” featuring Michael Moynihan and Austin Hatch at The HeightsCast. To help our seniors synthesize the many ideas, events, and texts they’ve surveyed across high school—and to help them better understand their own cultural moment—Heights teachers have developed a senior core class titled “History of Western Thought.” In this episode, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan and long-time teacher Austin Hatch discuss the course and one of its accompanying texts: Carl Trueman’s Strange New World (2022). Listen

How Phonics Instruction Helped Indiana Kids Read Better Than Many Adults by Catherine Gripp at The Federalist. The state of Indiana is bucking a nationwide decline in literacy after spending heavily to train and support teachers in phonics-based reading curriculum. The state recently released results showing Indiana was sixth in the nation in reading scores in 2024. Such statistics seem to back the assessment that the reading models grounded in leftist philosophy used for decades may have overcomplicated learning to read for millions of children. Read

“Let Them Be Born in Wonder” by Josh Herring at The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Aristotle told us years ago that “man is by nature a creature designed to know.” Students want to learn; they want to do hard things. This tradition itself is beautiful, perplexing, wonderful, inviting. Rather than starting new professional majors (e.g., a BS in AI-Prompt Engineering), it’s time to look ad fontes. Let them be born in wonder. Read

Charlotte Bishop Confirms Altar Rail Ban in Liturgical Directives for Schools by Niwa Limbu at The Catholic Herald. Bishop Michael Martin of Charlotte has issued a series of new liturgical directives for Masses celebrated in the three Catholic high schools under his jurisdiction…The measures include a prohibition on the use of kneelers and communion rails during the distribution of Holy Communion…In addition, the bishop has directed that projectors and screens be installed in the school chapels. These are to be used to display hymn texts and longer parts of the Mass, including the Gloria and the Creed, in place of printed worship books. Read

Featured: HISTORY250 at Cana Academy. In anticipation of America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, the Cana Academy team launched its latest initiative: HISTORY250. Intended to provide American history teachers with the most exceptional resources for leading their students, HISTORY250 is building out a collection of original short documentary films on the most important events in American history. Each film introduces viewers to a formative change in the life of America. All of the films together form a continuous narrative. Learn More

Throwback Thursday

Good Playing: For Their Sake and Ours by Dr. John Cuddeback at Life Craft on July 19, 2023. Children have a kind of natural fascination with many things, some of them good, some of them not. How they play, what they play and with whom they play will either grow or diminish these fascinations. Current customs, particularly because of the technologies involved, can turn play into something less than it should be. Often, real play is replaced with entertainment. Real play might be entertaining, but it is not simply entertainment. Watching a screen, or even pushing buttons on a screen or board–though it be called a ‘game’–fall short of being real play. Such are not a first exercise or practice in real life. Plato insisted that we must be attentive to what and how children play—indeed he thought it a key aspect of the formation of the young. Read