In the United States, there is a growing reform movement taking place in education, and it isn’t coming from our politicians or our universities. This movement finds its inspiration in a British crime writer, poet and educational reformer of the early 20th century named Dorothy Sayers, who is probably best known today for her outstanding translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The grassroots movement is largely led by parents who are unhappy with their children’s academic formation, and equally their moral formation. Inspired by an address Miss Sayers gave at Oxford in 1947, these parents are rejecting public and parochial schools and starting their own. They are reaching back centuries for their pedagogical structure and content, creating what has come to be called in the US a “classical education movement”.
What brought on this grassroots revolution in the US?
It is an embarrassing fact that public school systems in the US are failing children. Every new iteration of their flawed ideologies further weakens the foundations of knowledge. In fact, in 2019, Betsy DeVos, the previous president’s secretary of education, proclaimed a student achievement crisis in the US. The proof is in the latest statistics (2018): out of 71 countries, the US ranks 37th place in maths, 18th in science and 13th in reading.
The legacy institutions in the Catholic Church aren’t faring much better. Waning interest in parochial education has resulted in a precipitous decline. Enrolment in Catholic schools peaked in the 1960s at about 5.5 million students. Currently, however, enrolment stands at about 1.6 million. This trend has resulted in ongoing school closures such that the number of Catholic schools in the US has dwindled to 5,981, down from 11,000 in the 1970s.
Whether a symptom or a result of this trend, young Catholics continue to leave the Church in large numbers. Thirteen per cent of all American adults are former Catholics, and that number is increasing. Recent research shows the average age young people no longer identify as Catholic is 13.
Many parents are increasingly aware of the implication of these statistics on their ability to hold back the influence of an increasingly secular and ideologically driven culture. In their desire to raise faithful and well-educated children, they look for alternatives and take their children’s education into their own hands.
If you research schools and organisations promoting classical education, you will soon find Miss Sayers’ name with a reference to her essay called “The Lost Tools of Learning”. Even in 1947, she lamented that students she encountered knew how to read but had little understanding of words.
As she wrote in the essay: “They are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects”, and, therefore, the students become victims of propaganda.
What these new educational reformers have found in Miss Sayers and others is a pedagogy that forms children to think critically and grow in wisdom and virtue, which is the raison d’être of classical education.
It is estimated that over 500 Christian and Catholic classical elementary and secondary schools now exist in the US and the number is growing rapidly, and over a dozen US dioceses are currently working on renewing their diocesan schools following the classical model with the guidance of organisations such as the California-based Institute for Catholic Liberal Education. Parish schools once facing closure have been revived and in many cases their enrolment is booming.
The Regina Academies are a network of Catholic classical schools in the Philadelphia area. Our schools were the vision of Paul and Barbara Henkels, a generous Philadelphia couple strongly committed to the Catholic faith and to educational reform. Recognising the dual threat of declining academic performance and the failure of the Church’s legacy institutions to effectively transmit the Catholic faith to the young, they founded the first Regina Academy in 2003 and put it under the patronage of the Queen of Heaven. The Regina Coeli Academy would form children in faith and reason through their middle school years (about 14 years of age).
That first Regina school began with just a handful of students, but over the last 18 years, three other Regina Academies have been formed in the Philadelphia area. Each of these schools is the initiative of parents who want their children to have access to an exceptional classical education within an orthodox Catholic environment. Today the Regina Academies educate approximately 500 students in four schools and all are projecting strong growth in the next school year.
Essential to the Regina Academies is that all board and faculty members sign an Oath of Fidelity to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church each year. The Henkels wanted to ensure parents that they could count on the Regina Academies to impart the truths of the Roman Catholic Church faithfully to children as an integral, not ancillary, part of their overall formation.
Jesus Christ is the true master teacher, and so he is at the centre of all the Regina Academies. Whether the subject is maths, science, literature, music, grammar or logic, Jesus Christ is there because “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” (Jn 1.3,4)
The early grades, or what we call the grammar stage, focus on nurturing young children’s sense of wonder and teaching fluency in basic skills of arithmetic and language. Science begins in nature by inspiring wonder at God’s creation, and maths reveals the truths and patterns that define the order of all created things. History, literature, and other subjects in the humanities are integrated thematically in all grades so that students gain a comprehensive understanding of the development of the West through time. The West is prioritised because it is the culture that foreshadowed the coming of Christ and was radically transformed by the gift of the incarnation. It is our cultural patrimony and it is our obligation to conserve it for future generations.
As students advance into what we call the logic stage, around the middle school years, great literature that uncovers the inner depths of the human spirit is introduced and discussed in small class discussions, or a format we call Socratic seminar. Students make friends with Homer, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Twain, CS Lewis and others. Students study logic to help them spot fallacies and understand the rationality of thought that is unique to human persons created in God’s image. Latin starts in grade school. As a highly organised language, it sharpens the understanding of grammar, cultivates the mind, develops critical thinking and attention to detail. Again, all subjects flow from and ultimately lead back to the Incarnation.
Character is formed by entering into these conversations with the greatest minds that have ever lived. These authors teach students that actions have consequences and deepen our students’ understanding of the challenges and obligations of being human. Through our virtues curriculum, children learn to be successful and respectful in community, and to listen to and challenge various points of view in order to form their own beliefs grounded in truth.
One cannot be wise or virtuous without acknowledging that truth can be known, and that it is an objective reality that exists outside of us. The Regina Academies are faithfully Catholic schools that form students in faith and reason so that they can be truly free, not enslaved to contemporary addictions like technology, radical individualism and materialism that fail to bring true freedom and happiness.
And the proof is in the pudding. Regina Academies students consistently score in the top 85th to 99th percentile on standardised tests. They attend Mass faithfully with their families and participate in parish and school life. Most importantly, our schools are joyful places where children are not afraid to talk about their faith, engage in honest conversation with their peers, and ask questions and have them answered.
As one of our recent graduates said: “I’ve come to know that truth exists through studying logic, the Bible, and the Catechism, but the most personal way I’ve been shown this is by the virtuous lives people live around me every single day.” What more could one want for their children?
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