GOOD EDUCATION? NOT SO MUCH!

"Little of what merits the name of “education” goes on in our schools. Some subjects have been discarded: grammar, for instance, as a coherent and systematic whole. Our approach to education springs from a truncated view of man. It is dully utilitarian in its aims, which it nevertheless fails to meet. It fixes a low ceiling over the mind and heart and soul. It begins by denying God, by whom and for whom we are made, and proceeds to deny the objective existence of beauty and goodness, until at last all that’s left are the shreds of learning, political expediency, and the fads of the day." (Yes! this includes current trends in Catholic schools! Keep reading.) "Our schools are Petri dishes of vice: impiety, lust, spiritual sloth, ambition, and avarice...There’s no reason why parents should send their children to schools that sprinkle holy water upon the mind-deadening and soul-denying education provided in the public schools. If your child is going to be separated from faith and reason, you might as well purchase the ruin on the cheap. But they might well send their children to schools that are wholly different from the public schools. That single descriptor, “classical,” will attract their notice. If our Catholic schools are not classical, it’s high time they considered becoming so, and advertising themselves as such while they embark upon the reforms. Teach grammar as the logic of language, not a grab-bag of arbitrary usages. Read Homer and Virgil. Learn poetry—the most sublime of human arts, now almost vanished from the public schools. Reject Common Core and its useless utilitarianism, root and branch. Return geography to its rightful place in the elementary grades, as a separate subject from history. Return to world history, taught as an intricate whole; not ancient Egypt here and the Civil War there. Return to Latin. Return to reading important works in foreign languages: teach Spanish so that students can read Don Quixote, not just so that they can order tacos in Tijuana. Return to the titans of British and American literature. Make the practice and the truths of the faith permeate all subjects; let it be the air the students breathe. This cannot be, if they use the same dreadful textbooks the public students use. Establish a fund whereby a Catholic family can pledge to buy textbooks for one student in a classical Catholic school every year. If you do not have the teachers who can teach a classical curriculum, begin to find them. I know of plenty. Anthony Esolen, Crisis