The Futile War Against School Choice

Last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court heard arguments between the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board and the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Advocacy Coalition (OKPLAC). On one side, the school board defended its decision to include St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in their network and fund it like any other public charter school…On the other side, the lawyers for OKPLAC argued that this was mixing church and state and could result in “discriminatory practices, such as students being treated differently for their religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability—as well as not providing adequate services for students with disabilities.”

Classical Education: Self-Study or Personal Response?

"One hears a lot about the self these days: self-help, self-choice, self-fulfillment. Even classical educators sometimes march under the banner of the self: “Students should recognize themselves in the books they read.” To educate, however, is to lead out, and what students need is to be led beyond themselves. Do we have a better term than “self,” something clearly more open and outward? We do, and to boot, it is an older term with deep classical roots: namely, the person. "

What Is the Purpose of Poetry?

"In today’s educational milieu, it seems that poetry, particularly religious poetry, is either made a cadaver onto which cultural theorists impose an ideology or seen as mere ornamentation with no value in a world socially determined by economic utility and bottom lines. Poetry was once understood to be an anthropological episteme, a way of knowing, if only through a glass darkly. It was seen, even in the blind but percipient eyes of Homer, as a mimetic art representing the truth of our nature in relation to supernature."

Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education

"Amid growing claims that schools indoctrinate students, ‘classical education’—which teaches kids to think critically and master old books—is making a comeback…While this time-honored approach to education has fallen out of favor in recent decades—as many American schools have prioritized ideology and equal outcomes over excellence—it is now making a big comeback across the country. This is driven not only by parents’ growing realization of the old system’s academic failures but a sense that contemporary campus culture lacks much in the way of moral vision."

Growth in Classical Education a Sign of Great Hope

How do you transform the culture? Start with education. “If we are going to transform our culture we are going to have to talk about God as a fact, as a reason for changing one’s conduct — and we especially have to do it in a classroom,” said Dale Ahlquist, who founded the first Chesterton Academy. The Chesterton academies have spread across America and now the world — including Iraq and Sierre Leone — and they are just one example of a revolution in classical education. “It was a little spark and now it’s a wildfire,” Ahlquist said. “And we’re seeing cultural change from the ground up as a result.”

Parents Must Wake Up to the Dangers of Screen Addiction

"Melanie Hempe is the founder of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based organization ScreenStrong, which is aimed at preventing and reversing screen addiction in children and young people. She is also the mother of sons. One son, Adam, her eldest, developed a video game addiction, which eventually became the impetus behind ScreenStrong, and the basis of a spiel she now gives at ScreenStrong events… ScreenStrong medical advisor Dr. Adriana Stacey, who often co-presents with Hempe at events…said her preferred approach to social change is the one often attributed to Mother Teresa—“If you want to bring peace to the world, go home and love your family”—and she sees much of the harm from screens coinciding with the breakdown of the American family."

The Eucharist and Catholic Education

"The order with which God has created the universe is really amazing once you start to see it. It’s like one of those huge puzzles with little pieces each of which has some lovely colors, but they don’t really make sense until you start to fit them together and you realize what an incredible picture they make. And it is for this reason, among others, that the Eucharist should be at the center of every Catholic school…In classes, we talk about God. Or we talk about God’s handiwork in Creation. But in the Eucharist, God comes to us in person, in the person of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen."

Our Unhappy Youth

"Many young people appear to have fallen into the most antihuman way of life that any civilization has ever settled into…Those in the pharmaceutical industry are aware of the vein of gold that depression has opened up, with ordinary and unhappy people plying the pickax. That shouldn’t surprise any sensible Christian, who ought to know where some measure of earthly happiness is to be found, even for those who do not know Christ. "

The Theft of Education

In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay shares Jennifer McWilliams’s example of how a simple subtraction lesson can be turned into any number of political conversations about poverty, race, sex, gender, sexuality, family, parental authority or climate change...by a manipulative teacher-activist using the Freirean generative themes approach.

Raising Catholic Kids: New Study Suggests What Successful Parents Have in Common

Data cited by the researchers show that the number of people who remain practicing Catholics after being raised Catholic in the United States has been steadily declining for decades. In the 1970s, an average of 36 percent of those who were raised Catholic remained Catholic as adults and attended Mass weekly, peaking at 40 percent in 1977. By the 2010s, that figure was just 15 percent…Among those raised Catholic who leave the faith, about half become religiously unaffiliated and the other half adopts a new religious affiliation. The median age at which these former Catholics said they made the decision to leave the faith was 13, the researchers said.

A Phony Education

Far from making us better members of our clan, the smartphone makes us serfs to surfing, bound more surely—in our case, to algorithmic feeds—than those Indo-European prisoners of war who were the opposite of *priHós so many thousands of years ago. Jon Haidt’s Substack After Babel has presented extensively researched articles on the effects of social media on the most recent generations, especially those now college-aged. The results are not good. Essentially, mental health declines in a direct proportion to how early in life someone starts using a phone and how much time they spend on it. The freedom of communication, of being able to “look up” anything at any time, or “link up” with anyone for any reason, is not freedom.

The Truth of Things

Hard as it may be for normal people to grasp, the notion that there is only “my truth” and “your truth,” but nothing properly describable as the truth, is virtually axiomatic in the humanities departments of American “elite” universities, and has been for some time. Now, following the Orwellian script in Animal Farm, the woke plague has created a situation in which some of those personal “truths” are deemed more equal than others’ “truths”—the superior truths being the “truths” of political correctness.

Faith, Rights, and Choice in Education

Is education for persons, i.e., students and their parents, or is it for schools, i.e., the institutions where students go? Some readers may laugh at the question. Of course, education is for kids, not schools! But, if that’s so, then why are educational dollars – one of the things that makes education possible – for schools rather than kids? .... So shouldn’t the question be answered on the basis of what a person is due? On Catholic grounds, the answer would be “yes.” A person has a right and duty to know things, including above all, God. A person has a right to education. Persons (in the case of children those primarily charged with their interests, i.e., parents) have a right to choose the appropriate education for that child. All this also stems, in the end, from the love due to a person, including his integral development as a child of God, endowed with intellect and freedom of choice.

The Best and Brightest?

[I]t would probably be better if we told young people—and by this, I mean especially young people given the privilege of a college education—that they are not “the best and brightest.” That honor is something they will have to earn out in the world, by caring for others, doing things of value, and serving God and neighbor. Right now, they are just big balls of potential. Whether they’ll ever amount to much depends on whether they learn anything of value; master any important skills and virtues, including mastering their own passions and appetites; understand themselves and their fellow citizens better; and gain the experience they need out in the world, including the experience of recovering from mistakes and failure.

The Desecration of Man

[W]e must not ignore the agency of the cultural elites—the legal, educational, technological, artistic, managerial, and political classes. In the past, such elites saw themselves as tasked with continuity, with the transmission of values from generation to generation and the careful cultivation of the institutions and social practices that were necessary for this task. Today, the dominant impulse of our elites is toward disruption, destruction, and discontinuity. The abolition of man is a conscious project of our culture’s officer class, not merely the outcome of impersonal social and technological forces.

The New Paganism

This modern paganism is far worse than the one of old. The ancient pagans were required to be humble; to submit to a force larger than themselves. The modern pagans say in chorus with Lucifer: “I will not serve.” They will not serve God, men, the laws of nature, or the dictates of reason. Gender ideology especially is imbued with a mystical and amorphous character, such that rational attempts to combat its rhetoric quickly reach a dead end. Its advocates operate on the premise that they are sovereign gods over themselves; to what higher power, then, can we appeal to show them the truth?

Ivy League Presidents and the Collapse of Moral Reasoning

Rep. [Elise] Stefanik was asking the ultimate softball question: Do you think that inciting people to genocide, the wanton and indiscriminate killing of an entire race of people, is wrong? To be met with the answer, “Well, it depends upon the context” signaled to her, quite correctly, that her interlocutors had moved into complete and dangerous moral incoherence…. That appalling Congressional testimony served to blow the lid off of an increasingly dysfunctional culture on the campuses of our universities, which have become, sadly, not places where truth is sought, but hotbeds of woke ideology. Donors, parents, alumni—wake up. Do we want to be sending our kids to schools whose presidents cannot muster the intestinal fortitude to resist calls for genocide?

Children Lose Their Faith Far Earlier than Parents Realize

[The] falling away [of young people] from Christianity…. [is] the result of young people cultivating shallowness, superficiality, and solipsism as a philosophy of life—and from a very early age. A recent, fascinating report from Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies shows that the recent sharp drop in religious affiliation in the United States comes not from adults losing their faith but from children losing their faith far earlier than parents realize. The risk is less that a young person will lose his faith in college than that he lost his faith before he was fifteen, when he accepted that social media, online computer games, pop culture, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe constituted all the philosophy he needed; religion was irrelevant.

Christianity and Progress

As soon as we reject the reality of Original Sin, we begin to believe that man is immaculate in his nature, spotless at birth, and that it is only his environment that corrupts him. If this is the case, we can make people perfect by making their environment perfect. Furthermore, if the “constructs” of human civilization, such as religion and the traditional family, are considered to be the cause of human corruption, we only need to destroy religion and the traditional family in order to rid human society of corruption. This was the philosophical error which animated Rousseau’s “noble savage” as it is the philosophical error which animates modern “progressives.”

Recovering Catholic Identity and Education

There have been some attempts to argue for the Christian faith purely on the basis of philosophical reflection. ‘That’s mad,’ Prof [John] Haldane says. What matters for Catholicism is not just the content of the faith, what it is we believe—given the sheer number of Church councils defining various articles of faith, that obviously matters very much—but also the ‘source’ of truth…. ‘For the Christian, faith and joy do not depend on human estimations of how things are going, but are religious responses of trust in God, and joy at the prospect of salvation. It is these that must be brought into the work of meeting the challenges and seeking the opportunities surrounding Catholic education.’