A Parish School Turns Failure into Success

[SWolf]

So Sacred Heart of Jesus has reformed itself as a classical school. What that means is straightforward enough. It means no more and no less than education as was taken for granted in the western world for centuries. Yes, there are classes in Latin. But that alone won’t suffice. You can’t paste Latin onto the ordinary curriculum of our schools. It would be like inserting a Bach chorale into the middle of forty hours of rap. A classical curriculum is simply the liberal arts, the free-making arts, revived; it is a return to a love for goodness, truth, and beauty. It is not vampires and modern dystopias, with two or three inoculations of a half-dead Shakespeare virus—plays read apart from the tradition of English poetry, and apart from history and culture, so as to ensure that students will hate them, or be frustrated by them, or reduce them into something “modern” and forgettable. It is good poetry, good fiction, good songs, beautiful art, noble (or sometimes admonitory) history, clear grammar, clear logic, careful geography, a strong memory, facility with numbers, and always a glance toward the stars.

In the third academic year of its reform, Sacred Heart School has more than tripled its enrollment, which now stands at 230; and they are beginning a parish high school. Chancery bureaucrats did their best to get in the way, but the bishop said that he had grown tired of closing schools, and so he let the people at Sacred Heart succeed.

crisismagazine.com/2015/a-parish-school-turns-failure-into-success#.Vkx3NsK7DqY.mailto

 

[Allegra]

Sounds like a great school to me!

 

[midori]

Good for them.

Dorothy Sayers (Oxford graduate, Dante scholar, and mystery novelist) had an article called “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It talks about the Trivium, the importance of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, and so on. Thanks for the reminder to reread it.

 

[JimG]

This is the way education should be. It is as relevant now as ever. The author of the article, himself a college prof, notes of his own best students coming from the existing educational establishments:

“My best students at Providence College, unless they have studied Latin, know no grammar at all. My best students, unless they have gone to a school like Sacred Heart of Jesus, will likely never have heard the names of the greatest English poets: Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning. My best students know no geography and very little history. They have no songs, other than the spewing of mass entertainment.”

That is what must be corrected by a return to a classical education.