How Catholics Can Save American Education – By Jeremy Wayne Tate (Real Clear Politics) / April 22, 2024
I was a teacher and then worked in test prep before starting the Classic Learning Test. Before and especially since then, I’ve reviewed a lot of high school curricula, particularly from Catholic and/or classical high schools, which tend to get some flak for their focus on things like Latin, rhetoric, and philosophy. When people argue over the point of including classes like “An Overview of Medieval Mysticism” in a high school curriculum, it’s never long before someone says something like, “Oh, come on! When are they going to use that in real life?”
Now, there are a lot of things about this attitude that are weird. (For example, how and why is high school apparently not “real life”? Does it take place in the Matrix?) But the worst one is probably the idea that the workplace is real life. Because, let’s be honest, the workplace is what they’re talking about. They don’t mean that you won’t use what you learned about St. John of the Cross while you’re on a hiking trip building friendships that will last decades, or that it will never be relevant to the readings and the homily at Mass – even though, if you think about it, Mass has a much more convincing claim to be “real life” at the expense of everything else we do. What they mean is that you probably aren’t going to use that knowledge in the office. Put more crudely, they mean you aren’t going to be able to make money from knowing it. That’s a really sad idea of what education is.
The reason I started the CLT in the first place was because, as a parent and a Catholic, I want more for my kids than that. W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote that “the object of education is not to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men.”4 In other words, the kind of education that’s primarily about making money is an unsatisfying, inadequate substitute for the kind of education that enriches students. Education should mature and develop our powers as human beings – the powers of perception, analysis, reasoning, judgment, and creativity that we have from God as beings made in his image. That means training students to deal with questions that we all have sooner or later: questions about truth, beauty, right and wrong, the purpose of life, and what lies beyond death…
