So what is Catholic classical education and how does it differ from a Catholic education not modified by the adjective Classical?
Differences between Catholic Classical Education and Catholic Education
Many prospective St. Ann’s parents attended Catholic school and experienced Catholic education firsthand. For those who attended non-Catholic private schools or even public schools, the pedagogical methodology was honestly not much different. Of course, in Catholic schools, the curriculum is imbued with the doctrines of the Catholic faith and principles of Catholic morality. Emphasis is on the transcendent, certainly preparing students for the path to a career, but more importantly for the path to heaven.
Catholic classical education certainly offers all of this and, in the primary grades, the emphasis is still on mastering the ABCs, arithmetic, reading comprehension, penmanship, the times tables and all those traditional aspects of education that date back millennia.
Learning to Think and Reason in Catholic Education
As students progress through each grade, more and more importance is placed on learning to think, reason, and communicate as it is on rote memorization. Education is so much more than mere data entry. While the acquisition of facts and information is vital, the ability to process those facts and draw conclusions from that information is so much more important. Learning to think and reason is a vital skill in any path of life. I’ll not use phrases like “so important in today’s world” because the ability to think and reason has been important in any given era of history.
Plato’s Socratic dialogues dating back twenty-five hundred years bears this out. Through a process of questions and answer, question and answer, Socrates trained the minds of his students to think and justify their conclusions.
Integrating Faith and Reason in Catholic Classical Education
Learning how to think is a process that can be taught. It is not an innate characteristic. Note that the emphasis here is how to think, not what to think. True, at a Catholic school, students will learn the moral doctrines and objective truths of the Catholic faith. More importantly, they will learn why the Church teaches what it does.
St. Ann’s students will learn that thinking is a skill, as is logical reasoning. They will learn how to recognize bad logic from good logic, knowing how to identify and reject superficial reasoning, and how to make an intelligent argument for or against a given position. Students need to know what true thinking is, especially as so many believe that thinking merely requires mentally rearranging one’s preconceived ideas so as to arrive at a preferred conclusion. This is a skill which will be helpful throughout life but especially in higher education where academic elites will consider it their mission in life to teach their students what to think rather than how to think. We also help students overcome the natural resistance to thinking. Thinking takes work and intellectual sloth must be overcome to achieve it.
Many people prefer to have others do their thinking for them. Thomas Edison once said “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” Our goal at St. Anne’s is to place your children in that five percent.
Preparing Students for Eternity in Catholic Education
Education is, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “ordered to a single thing, namely, to man's perfection, which is happiness.”
In years past, many schools taught a subject called rhetoric, a word that today has developed somewhat of a negative connotation – That’s just political rhetoric someone might say, even to a person making a coherent logical argument for a given position, and often for the reason that their untrained minds cannot recognize a coherent logical argument when they hear one. In fact, rhetoric was a skill once highly prized as it was a prerequisite to a career in law or politics. It emphasized public speaking, but the message delivered needed to be logically coherent, without which it devolves into mere demagoguery. Such courses have fallen by the wayside over the years as education has progressed (some would save regressed) into job skill training which, while important, does not suffice to form the whole person. While a student’s goal may be a career on Wall Street or in medicine or law, that is not the end goal for which he is being prepared. A career is still a means to an end. The true goal is eternity with God in heaven.
This purpose was made clear by Pope John Paul II in a 1987 address to Catholic school teachers when he said “the ultimate goal of all Catholic education is salvation in Jesus Christ. Catholic educators effectively work for the coming of Christ’s Kingdom; this work includes transmitting clearly and in full the message of salvation, which elicits the response of faith. In faith we know God, and the hidden purpose of His will.”
Catholic Classical Education and the Pursuit of Truth
This is precisely the purpose of St. Ann Classical Academy - to allow students to grow intellectually by inspiring them to pursue the truth. Then, to help them understand that truth. Faith seeking understanding, to use St. Anselm’s storied phrase. We hold that children are made in the image and likeness of God and we aim to help them meet that God both spiritually and intellectually.