‘Classical Catholic education is going to save America’: A peek into the growing school model

(LifeSiteNews) — Classical Catholic education is fast gaining a reputation as the gold standard for primary and secondary schools, and for good reason. The model not only teaches students how to reason and think critically, but forms them in virtue, so that children use their learning to elevate their own soul and those of others, and not simply serve the beast. And it beats modern education at its own game in the process.

Walking into a classroom of St. Thomas Aquinas Academy (STA) in Tampa, Florida, one is immediately struck by its atmosphere of deep peace and order, one of the fruits of its Catholic, classical model. The walls are studded with truly great and beautiful works of art. The bookshelves are stocked with classics and wholesome adventure stories, all vetted by adults — a far cry from the trash found in public schools today. The students are fully and enthusiastically engaged in learning.

This is where God’s ranks are being formed. Against automatons who are educated to more efficiently feed a corrupt establishment, these children are taught to love and serve the true good of society. Against moderns who are indoctrinated into relativism and degenerate living, these children are strengthened to live virtuously. Instead of an education that half-forms their intellect and dampens their sense of purpose and mission by boring them to death, these students are nourished with the fullness of truth in its grandeur and beauty, and with stories that inspire them to greatness.

“Classical Catholic education is going to save America,” Ed Maurer, infrastructure engineer at St. Thomas Aquinas Academy, told LifeSiteNews. He ventured to speculate that even a president or Supreme Court Justice could come from the school’s student body. “I say this because our students can critically think and present a line of reasoning with clarity and truth. These are skills not being taught elsewhere … and as you know, cream rises to the top.”

The bigger picture

One of the keys to classical Catholic education is that it approaches the arts and sciences from the higher lens of their source: God. This means students understand everything they learn more clearly, because they see the world and all it contains in the context of the purpose for which it was created and ordered (its telos).

This is why the Church “is the wellspring from which universities began,” as Emily Fisher, a co-founder and board president of St. Thomas Aquinas Academy, pointed out. 

John Monaco, head of school at Stella Maris Academy in San Francisco, affirmed that compartmentalizing the Catholic faith and the rest of our knowledge, as is a typical practice today, stunts us intellectually.

“The idea that we can somehow compartmentalize our faith, as if it were a private, sensible feeling, and then proceed to develop our non-religious knowledge is a deeply unserious form of education,” Monaco told LifeSiteNews. “The Catholic faith doesn’t inhibit our intellect; rather, it elevates it. To not see things as an ordered whole by a good and loving God is to see the picture half-painted.”

Understanding different subjects as meaningfully interconnected, since they all emanate from God and are part of a greater ordered whole, is facilitated at St. Thomas Aquinas Academy by cross-connecting their subjects, including especially with religion. For example, as Fisher noted, they learn about salvation history in the context of world history. Seeing a meaningful arc of history gives them an intellectual edge in the sense that they can see the bigger picture of history, rather than just understanding it as a fragmented chain of events.

But it also helps accomplish the powerful effect of inspiring students and teaching them to “creatively respond to the challenges of their own time,” said Fisher, and through the lens of the salvation of souls in particular.

This is just one example of the many ways in which classical Catholic education inspires students to virtuous, constructive lives. Monaco helped explain why “just about all” of society’s deficiencies can be traced in some way to a neglect of Catholic and classical education.

“Our will follows our intellect, and if our intellects are malformed, our wills follow,” Monaco explained. “Everything, from the inability of political candidates to establish common terms and definitions when debating, to protest chants of ‘love is love,’ to people who try to change reality to fit their emotions — all of these things reflect a failure in modern education to truly develop a person’s intelligence and behavior.”

The best of the arts

Classical education also, in a natural fashion, forms students to love what is good and virtuous by steeping them in the best of the arts: beautiful art, music, and literature. This is not of trivial importance, as Monaco helped explain.

“When we showcase the greatest achievements of Western Civilization, we ourselves are motivated to achieve great and mighty things,” he told LifeSiteNews.

In addition to wanting to “hand on the beautiful intellectual tradition of the Church” to her own children,  Fisher said one of her key motivations in founding St. Thomas Aquinas was to surround her children with what is “good, true and beautiful.”

Instead of pop culture, STA prioritizes “the best works of art, the most beautiful music, the books that are going to inspire children to virtue, that are ennobling,” she explained. 

As she alluded to, the quality of the arts that students are surrounded with takes on moral importance, a fact ignored by most schools. A piece of literature, for example, can inspire a child to commit vengeful and debauched deeds, or good and heroic ones. This is why books at STA are carefully chosen to “follow the precepts of the moral universe,” Fisher shared.

Books can also form a child to see the world as a place where everyone’s actions are of trivial importance, or a grand stage where good and evil battle it out, and they have a part to play. When students read stories such as King Arthur, for instance, which tells of a man with a clear sense of mission who embarks on noble quests, it helps to instill “a sense of vocation and purpose in them,” Fisher noted.

Students are moved to think about how the Lord is calling them in the future versus simply thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, she added.

Fisher also stressed that the school’s curriculum uses novels that are at least 50 years old. She explained, “That doesn’t mean there aren’t good things being written now. When something has withstood the test of time, it has been found worthy by previous generations of handing onto us.”

The works of Shakespeare are examples of classics featured prominently in the school that the students immerse themselves in through performances of his plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.

In addition, STA showcases a few well-chosen, remarkably beautiful pieces of sacred and classical art in each classroom.

“It really shows the dignity of what you’re doing. You’re surrounded by beauty because what you’re doing is important,” Fisher explained. The atmosphere of fine art is “ennobling,” in contrast to most elementary school classrooms “covered top to bottom with posters” and “bright, childish images.”

Fisher explained that such beautiful art, including sacred scenes, that are “a big part of classical education” helps to order the affections of the children — “not just to know what is good but to love what is good … according to the mind of the Church and the mind of Christ.”

Beyond knowledge: formed for Heaven

Thus, the quality of the arts in classical Catholic education is another way in which it helps move the soul of the student to virtue, a critical part of its most important end. This is because virtue sets a child on the trajectory to Heaven, his own ultimate end — the purpose for which he was created. The alternative to such education is aptly described by C.S. Lewis: “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

Fisher emphasized that the school’s main task, as expressed in its mission statement, is to form young people in faith, wisdom and virtue.

Virtue does not only lead a child to Heaven. It makes him happier in this life, Monaco pointed out, as he helped explain the importance of forming virtue in education:

“Many people in the world vocally express their desire to ‘be happy.’ The virtues are those fixed and habitual dispositions that bring us to true happiness. Just like we would not feel comfortable teaching children errors in math or science, we should also feel uncomfortable if we do not teach children the art of right conduct. Children need guides, such as teachers, on the path to virtue. Modern education largely reduces virtue to ‘just be a good person,’ but when pressed, can never really tell us what ‘good’ means in the first place.”

To form students in the Catholic faith and instill in them the grace needed for virtue, STA provides a rule of life rich in prayer and the sacraments. The students attend Mass daily, and confession and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament weekly. They pray throughout the day, from beginning to end, including a morning offering, a prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Angelus at noon.

The school events are liturgically based as well, said Fisher, helping to immerse students in the life and history of the Church in all its festivity and solemnity. 

“Whether we are celebrating All Saints Day or the Feast of the Archangels, or St. George’s day, we want our events, everything that we do, to be pointing to higher realities,” Fisher told LifeSiteNews. 

Such a strong spiritual regimen, combined with the religious formation woven into students’ academics, helps build students in the faith and conviction that predisposes them to religious life, Maurer noted.

“Religious life will become an attractive option for students when they experience the full beauty of our faith in all their subjects,” he pointed out.

One of the beautiful ways in which the school helps encourage the priesthood and religious life from the earliest ages is its use of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a method designed to introduce three- to six-year-olds to Jesus Christ and His teachings in a hands-on manner appropriate to their age. The young children have an opportunity to play-act parts of Mass using objects representing sacred vessels during their time in the Atrium, the space set aside for this experiential learning.

Fruitful spiritual and religious formation is also fostered by the careful selection of teachers at STA. Fisher shared that the school looks for “well-formed adults” who know their faith and witness it with their lives, in part because faith-related questions “might come up at any time” during learning. All teachers must not only be practicing Catholics, but they must take an oath of fidelity to the magisterium and the local bishop. “We want to know that they’re a good example by the way they’re living,” Fisher added.

The formation a child receives from Classical Catholic education is priceless. But now, at STA and elsewhere in Florida, such education is more accessible than ever before. The state’s Step Up for Students Program provides scholarships and education savings accounts (ESAs) for K-12 students, allowing families to fund private school tuition, homeschooling, or specialized educational services. Learn more about the program here.

Learn more about St. Thomas Aquinas Classical Academy, located in Tampa, Florida, here.