Apr 17, 2025
Classical Catholic Education or Bust by Raymond Dansereau at Crisis Magazine. In mission lies the greatest difference between the traditional liberal arts (or classical Catholic education) and the modern public education that has been adopted in too many Catholic schools across the country. Where modern public education asks what students should know, a classical education asks the more important question: What kind of person should this student be? Read
Conservatives Seize the Moment to Remake Higher Ed by Josh Moody at Inside Higer Ed. At a forum Tuesday morning called “Reclaiming the Culture of American Higher Education,” the architects of Project 2025, an official from the U.S. Department of Education and four college presidents cast the sector as ripe for reform. The event offered insights into how conservative thinkers operating the levers of power at the Education Department view the current state of higher education and the need for change. Read
Arizona Governor Signs Law to Ban Cellphones in Classrooms by Annabella Rosciglione at The Washington Examiner. Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) signed a law Monday to curb cellphone use in K-12 classrooms. The new law will require public school districts and charter schools across the state to adopt policies that limit student access to cellphones. Exemptions will be made for emergencies, medical conditions, and “educational purposes.” Read
Snapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale by Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch at After Babel. On October 1, 2024, investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz reported a startling statistic from an internal Snap Inc. email quoted in a court case against Snap Inc., the company which owns Snapchat. The email noted that the company receives around 10,000 reports of sextortion each month—and that figure is likely “only a fraction of the total abuse occurring on the platform.” Read
Catholic Charter School Funding Fight Heads to Supreme Court by Moira Gleason at The Daily Signal. Oklahoma consistently ranks among the worst states in the country for public school outcomes. In an effort to improve educational options, the state’s official charter school board and an online Catholic charter school are fighting what they say is religious discrimination all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Read
The Standardized Testing Pendulum Swings Back by Suraj Shah and Jonathan Butcher at The Daily Signal. In the name of “equity,” many competitive colleges had stopped using entrance exams in their application process. Now, the pendulum has swung: Realizing that standardized tests actually do help school officials evaluate applications, administrators at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Brown, MIT, and more have reinstated use of the SAT and ACT. Read
Kansas Lawmakers Override Governor to Pass Prenatal Education Bill by Bridget Sielicki at Live Action. One day after Kansas Democratic Governor Laura Kelly vetoed two bills, the state’s Republican lawmakers overrode her actions. The bills, which mandate the addition of prenatal development education in the state’s schools as well as child support for pregnant women, will soon take effect. Read
The Resurrection: An Event Like No Other by Andrew J. Zwerneman at Cana Academy. As a liberal art or, more generally, as our perspective on life lived under past events, history frees us to see what we could not see otherwise. We are freed by history’s capacity to deal in the singular, unrepeatable events of the past. By observing our forebears in those events, even though they are singular, unrepeatable persons themselves, we can learn about ourselves. Of all the unrepeatable events in the past, none frees us to see what we can of our life after death more than the Resurrection. What we see is possible because the Resurrection happened in history. Read
The 2nd Adeodatus Conference on Catholic Education, June 18-21 at Belmont Abbey College by David Clayton at New Liturgical Movement. This four-day gathering brings together educators, scholars, and Catholic thought leaders to explore the integral formation of students and teachers in mind, body, and spirit. Each day will focus on a distinct theme, beginning with Sound Bodies & Keen Minds, addressing topics like memory, mimesis, and freedom from technological tyranny. Read
Throwback Thursday
Teaching Character Education With the Anthropology of St. John Paul II by Edward Pentin at National Catholic Register on November 27, 2018. Alive to the World is a program created by Christine de Marcellus de Vollmer, a former member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, to teach virtues to children and adolescents…Virtue-directed skills are taught through the program, such as “decision-making, how to stand up politely and firmly for what is right, how to come to agreements in a principled way and how to debate effectively.” Young Catholics today “need these skills,” Vollmer said, especially after 70-plus years of Christian culture being “aggressively” eroded by “various ideologies” and “much pain” being inflicted on children and adolescents due to the fallout of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s. Read |