Are We Catholic Enough to Make Enemies?
St. John Bosco underwent assassination attempts because of his bold mission in Catholic education. Should Catholic schools expect to make similar enemies if they are truly teaching the Faith?
Reigniting the Fires of Catholic Education
If education is not to be a matter of merely filling buckets which happen to be empty, but of lighting fires that have gone out, how are we to set them blazing again?
Florida’s Educational Reform: Freedom or Repression?
Until last year, no American politician has had the guts to tackle the plague of wokery in our schools. This has changed—in Florida, of all places, home of Key West, South Beach, and Fort Lauderdale!
Overschooled and Undereducated
The purpose of schooling—which is not the same as education—is to encourage people to express confident platitudes, which they are pleased to call their opinions, about things they know nothing of.
Wisdom Requires Purity of Heart
The pure of heart are the blessed ones, Christ tells us, because having rid themselves of every distraction, their eyes remain fixed upon God alone.
(Better) Advice to Students in a Time of Strife
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days,” the great Solzhenitsyn told America’s intellectual elite at Harvard in 1978. It was heartening, therefore, to read a letter of “Advice to Students in a Time of Strife,” published by First Things in late … Read more
Separation of School and State
We are living in a strange time, to be sure—a strange amalgam of the last short years of the antebellum South and Weimar Germany. If we were selling it to a studio as a film idea, we would have to say it’s the first half-hour or so of Gone with the Wind meets Cabaret. Amid … Read more
The Fate of the First Amendment Will Be Decided By These Nine Cases
This month the Little Sisters of the Poor returned to the U.S. Supreme Court, once again defending their right to practice the Catholic Faith by refusing to provide for contraceptives in their health insurance plan. This is a stark reminder that even years later the Obama administration’s assault on religious freedom continues to impact religious … Read more
Education for Darkness
Pity today’s college teachers, especially those at the rank of assistant professor. After years of graduate study, they were fortunate enough to find a college teaching job. Soon, however, they discovered that the subjects and courses they love to teach must be made “user-friendly.” This means emphasis, primarily, upon getting good student evaluations. One usually … Read more
Teaching on COVID Time
England declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, just two days after the Nazis invaded Poland. It became a live question, with the Michaelmas term about to begin, whether universities in England should continue to carry out their essential task of learning. For at universities (and any educational institution) students learn (presumably!), and they … Read more
Why Boys Are Failing
When he was 13 years old, a mere boy was effectively the American ambassador to Russia, in Saint Petersburg. This was because the lad was fluent in French while his nominal superior, the ambassador himself, was not. The boy had already, at his father’s instruction, translated works of Plutarch from Greek and poems by Horace … Read more
Just Say ‘No’
In 2018, the Maryland legislature passed a bill requiring that sex education classes—those taught to thirteen-year-olds—include lessons on the meaning of consent. The results have been unsurprising. A January article in the Washington Post reports on seventh graders at Hallie Wells Middle School “huddled around a table in their second-period health class,” debating a scenario … Read more
Will the Blaine Amendments Fall at Last?
Imagine there was a program to help fund alternative schooling including religious schooling, and even the costs of homeschooling, that was not under the control of the U.S. Congress. Not possible, right? Wrong! I was at the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday for oral arguments in the landmark case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. … Read more
The Battle for St. Anselm College
Fearing that New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College is at risk of losing its Catholic identity, and that their voices will be silenced, members of the order of Benedictine monks of Saint Anselm Abbey—the monastic order that founded the college—have filed a lawsuit against Saint Anselm’s Board of Trustees. The lawsuit, filed on November 27th in Hillsborough … Read more
The Model Priest for a Church in Crisis
In his spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, Blessed John Henry Newman informs us: “When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816), a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never … Read more
Are Our Schools Overdosing on Self-Esteem?
I was recently in a Catholic school assembly of about 6oo elementary students watching various children receive awards and recognition. After the various awards were given, a music video was shown on the screen and all the children began to sing the lyrics. It was here, watching this music video about how “I am great, … Read more
The Protestant Origins of Dysfunctional Education
As a former boarding school teacher, this time of year brings memories of enormous frustration at the chaos, moral and intellectual, that is contemporary American education. While the general disorder is the fault of Adam and Eve, the particular mess has much to do with Luther and Calvin, who not only spawned the Protestant Reformation … Read more
What it Means to be an Educated Human Being
We are born and live in a certain location and in a certain time. By what appears to be the caprice of geography and chronology, we are thus, in a sense, “locked into” a particular place and period. In other words, we are trees in a forest we cannot descry; consequently, gaining perspective—seeing macroscopically instead … Read more
All Teacher Candidates Need to Know Is On the Web
In one of Baudelaire’s spleen poems called “The Generous Gambler,” a boulevardier is steered by a “Mysterious Being” into a subterranean casino. There they drink and chat till dawn, gambling all the while. The Mysterious Being proves an urbane and chatty devil, old fashioned in manners, but progressive in philosophy. The only time he’d ever … Read more
Boys, Porn and Education: What Can Be Done?
Problems are oftentimes more obvious than solutions. In a recent article, I wrote on the obstacle that Internet pornography introduces to masculine education by injuring the sense of wonder and the sacred. I recalled how the effects of this “drug” were ones that my old boarding-school headmaster was reticent to allow into the culture of … Read more