Embracing a classical education By Julia Duin, Sunday, April 10, 11:03 AM It’s 1 p.m. and time for Amy Clayton’s fifth grade to show off their memorization skills.

Decked out in blue long-sleeved shirts and dark pants for boys and bright yellow blouses and plaid jumpers for girls, the students begin with the words of Patrick Henry’s immortal “Give me liberty or give me death” speech first delivered on March 23, 1775, in Richmond. That recitation merges into verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” That morphs into a few phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and finally to fragments of speeches by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

“Beautifully done,” Clayton says at the conclusion. “We just encapsulated 80 years of American history in our recitation.” She is engaged, dramatic, and students are nearly jumping out of their seats trying to answer her questions about the beginnings of the Civil War. To her right is a banner containing a quote from Aesop: “No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” Near that hangs a crucifix.

This is St. Jerome Classical School, the new name for what once was a traditional Roman Catholic elementary and middle school in Hyattsville. Starting last spring, St. Jerome’s began transforming itself from a debt-ridden, pre-K-8 institution into a showcase for one of the more intriguing trends in modern education. It is one of a handful of archdiocesan Roman Catholic schools in the country to have a classical curriculum.

“Classical” education aims to include instruction on the virtues and a love of truth, goodness and beauty in ordinary lesson plans. Students learn the arts, sciences and literature starting with classical Greek and Roman sources. Wisdom and input from ancient church fathers, Renaissance theologians and even Mozart — whose music is sometimes piped into the classrooms to help students concentrate better — is worked in.

On the hallway walls outside Clayton’s classroom are student posters on the theme “What is goodness?,” “rules for knights and ladies of the Round Table,” drawings of Egyptian pyramids, directions to “follow Jesus’ teachings” and “be respectful toward others,” and other exhortations to live a noble life.

“The classical vision is about introducing our students to the true, the good, the beautiful,” Principal Mary Pat Donoghue points out. “So what’s on our walls are classical works of art. You won’t see Snoopy here.”

Classical theory divides childhood development into three stages known as the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. During the “grammar” years (kindergarten through fourth grade), children soak up knowledge. They memorize, absorb facts, learn the rules of phonics and spelling, recite poetry, and study plants, animals, basic math and other topics. Moral lessons are included.

Thus, in Mary Pat Pollock’s first-grade class, students recite an Aesop’s fable on how a cold north wind made a man cling to his coat but a warm sun persuaded him to remove it.

“What did the sun do?” Pollock asks.

“She was gentle,” first-grader Tommy Hill responds.

“And what did the north wind do that didn’t work?” Pollock asks. The children conclude that being gentle works, but being harsh is bad.

In the “logic” stage (roughly grades five through eight), children learn to analyze, question, discern and evaluate. Students learn to think through arguments, pay attention to cause and effect and begin to see how facts fit together. This is where the study of algebra and how to propose and support a thesis comes in.

The “rhetoric” stage (grades nine through 12) concentrates on acquiring wisdom and applying knowledge. Students learn to express themselves persuasively.

In Michael Murray’s fourth-grade class, students are moving into the logic stage using focused discussion. They have just read from Plato’s “The Republic” about how people behave when they think no one is watching.

Murray opens the discussion by asking who would like to be invisible. Hands shoot up.

“When you’re invisible, no one can catch you,” a girl says.

“But then you could steal things, and no one would know,” a boy responds.

“Do we act different in a public setting than a private one?” the teacher asks.

“Yeah,” the kids respond.

Central to St. Jerome’s revised curriculum is Latin. “It’s a language based on a lot of logic, and it builds the skill of using logic,” says Latin teacher Elizabeth Turcan. “You don’t have that as much with more common modern languages.’’

Turcan was one of eight teachers brought in this year to jump-start St. Jerome’s renaissance. Another was Merrill Roberts, a doctoral candidate in physics and a former public school teacher now teaching nature studies to the upper grades. He uses the Socratic method when he can.

“We’re trying to teach students the need to know the truth of something and the importance of the question,” he says.

“I don’t think the structure of public school lends itself to questions,” he adds. “The structure is set up to say, ‘This is what you need to know, and here’s the facts.’ ”

Research comparing classical education with other teaching methods is hard to come by. But according to the Moscow, Idaho-based Association of Classical and Christian Schools, classically educated students had higher SAT scores in reading and writing in 2010 than students in public, independent and other private schools. They tied with independent school students, scoring the highest in math.

A year ago, St. Jerome’s was $117,469 in debt and, as one parent joked, “held together by bake sales and duct tape.” Enrollment had dropped from 530 students in 2001-2002 to 297 eight years later.

Something had to be done fast. During a consultation organized by the Archdiocese of Washington, parents and parishioners urged school officials to consider the classical model. Then-archdiocesan superintendent Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill supported the idea, even though it was a novelty for parochial Catholic schools, which tend to be structured like public schools with an overlay of religious instruction.

Donoghue formed a curriculum committee of parishioners that included parents, homeschoolers and former Peace Corps volunteers, and they began drawing on educational materials from across the country.

The organizers knew of only one other Catholic parochial school — St. Theresa’s in Sugar Land, Tex. — that was trying this method. About 230 other classical schools in the country were mostly run by evangelical Protestants.

“We defined what we meant by ‘classical’ in very Catholic terms,” says Michael Hanby, a committee member and a professor at the John Paul II Institute at Catholic University. “It was not just a method but an incorporation into the whole treasure of Christian wisdom, which includes that of Christian cultures. Our students would get a coherent understanding of history, literature, art, philosophy — the traditions to what Catholics in the West are heirs.”

Parishioners and parents raised $190,000 to retire the debt. After hundreds of hours of work, the committee produced a lengthy educational plan that included curricula for each grade and subject, lists of suggested books, and criteria that each detail of the school’s life would have to satisfy. Examples: Is it beautiful? Are we doing this because it’s inherently good or as a means to an end? If the latter, what end? Does it encourage reverence for the mystery of God and the splendor of His creation? Does it encourage the student to desire truth, to understand virtues and to cultivate these within him (or her) self?

The plan was for students in successive grades to work their way through the history of civilization, beginning with ancient Egypt in kindergarten,ancient Greece for grade one, the Roman Empire in grade two, the Middle Ages in grade three and so on. Religion, art, Latin, nature studies, math, music and physical education also are worked in. Although some of the influences from more than 2,000 years back are pagan, that doesn’t faze music teacher Michelle Orhan, who teaches third-graders about the nine Muses who are daughters of ancient Zeus.

“I want them to have a well-rounded vision of what music is and where it comes from,” Orhan says after a session of explaining the origins of Calliope, Terpsichore and Urania. “We also discuss the disadvantages of polytheism, a discussion you can’t have in public school today. In anything having to do with Greek mythology, you have to talk about the gods.”

Already other dioceses are taking a serious look at what’s happening at St. Jerome’s to see whether their aging Catholic schools can turn into classical academies. Or, like St. Theresa’s, they can begin their classical school from the ground up.

About 20 miles southwest of Houston, St. Theresa’s school building was dedicated in August 2009. Romanesque arches cover outside walkways. In the atrium, the lower level is Doric columns with images of the seven virtues in the frieze, the upper level is Ionic pilasters. Noted ecclesiastical architect Duncan G. Stroik — also an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame — was commissioned to design the school.

“It’s hard to change the status quo in Catholic education,” says St. Theresa’s Principal Jonathan Beeson, a Yale Divinity School graduate and former Protestant minister who converted to Catholicism. “If you’re not versed in the history of ideas, you cannot be self-critical.”

Teachers from across the country are now applying to work at the pre-K through second-grade school, which is planning to add one grade each year. Latin starts in first grade. Second-graders learn Greek history. Everyone memorizes poetry.

“There’s not a single one of the 92 kids here who’s not eager to recite a poem,” Beeson says. “Kids need content in their brains, and they’re wired to absorb facts. You can’t reflect on something if it’s not in your brain.”

Beeson sees a day when the classical method will become widely accepted by Catholics.

In Washington, Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl backs St. Jerome’s, according to Bert L’Homme, the new archdiocesan school superintendent.

“The classical curriculum existed in the Catholic universities of Paris, Padua and Oxford,” he says. “It’s rooted in the church. The combination of Catholic and classical education is very enticing to some parents.”



Julia Duin, whose most recent book is “Days of Fire and Glory,” is a religion writer living in Maryland whose daughter briefly attended St. Jerome’s. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

1 Comment
 
 
Washington Post

Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents.
By Patrick Welsh
Sunday, October 18, 2009




"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"

In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."

Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.

I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn't be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father's absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don't: parents.

My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.

In an example of how bad the fixation on race here has become, last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout the city to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone -- including 10-year-old kids -- could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that "whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid." A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: "That's not me." When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don't need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed.

Achievement gaps don't break down neatly along racial lines. Take Yasir Hussein, a student of mine last year whose parents emigrated from Sudan in the early 1990s, and who entered the engineering program at Virginia Tech this fall. "My parents were big on our family living the American dream," he said. "One quarter when I got a 3.5 grade-point average, the guys I hung around with were congratulating me, but my parents had the opposite reaction. They took my PlayStation and TV out of my bedroom and told me I could do better."

Yasir said it wasn't just fear that made him study: "Knowing how hard my parents worked simply to give me the opportunity to get an education in America, it was hard for me not to care about getting good grades."

But Yasir's experience isn't what community activists and school administrators at T.C. Williams or around the country focus on. They cast the difference between kids who are succeeding in school and those who are not in terms of race and seem obsessed with what they call "the gap" between the test scores of white and black students.

This year, community groups in St. Louis and Portland, Ore., issued reports decrying the gap. After a recent state report on test scores in California schools, Jack O'Connell, the state's superintendent of instruction, said the gap is "the biggest civil rights issue of this generation" -- a very popular phrase in education circles.

But focusing on a "racial achievement gap" is too simple; it's a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.

Last year, two of the finest and most dedicated teachers at my school -- one in science and one in math -- tried to move students who were failing their classes into more appropriate prerequisite courses, because the kids had none of the background knowledge essential to mastering more advanced material. Both teachers were told by a T.C. Williams administrator that the problem was not with the students but with their own low expectations.

"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."

Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over. "Even with best teachers in the world, they don't have the power to solve the problem," he says. "They naively assume that if they throw in a little tutoring and mentoring and come up with some program they can claim as their own, the gap will close."

Perhaps nothing shows how out of touch administrators are with the depth of poor students' problems more than the way they chose to start this school year. The Alexandria School Board had added two more paid work days to the calendar, a move that cost more than $1 million in teachers' salaries. So the administration decided to put on a three-day conference they dubbed "Equity and Excellence." We were promised "world-class speakers." If only that had been true. As part of the festivities, Sherman formed a choir of teachers and administrators that gave us renditions of "Imagine" and "This Land Is Your Land." Sherman closed the conference by telling us that if we didn't believe that "each and every" child in Alexandria could learn, he would give us a ticket to Fairfax County.

Now, six weeks into the academic year, some 30 fights -- two gang-related -- have taken place at T.C. Williams. I wish those three days had been spent bringing students to school to lay out clear rules and consequences, and for sessions on conflict resolution and anger management.

Last week, Sherman announced that a second installment of "Equity and Excellence" featuring a "courageous conversation" with Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, will take place at T.C. Williams tomorrow. I am eager to find ways to help my students succeed, but I am afraid that Ferguson -- whose book includes a chapter titled "Teachers' Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap" -- may underestimate what it will take to meet the challenges that we face.

There is one moment of those frivolous first days of the year that I do keep returning to: One of the speakers, Yvette Jackson, the chief executive of the National Urban Alliance, made it clear that the lip service and labels Alexandria is putting forward are not going to help children who are what she calls "school-dependent learners." These are students from low-income backgrounds who need school to give them the basic knowledge that other kids get from their families -- knowledge that schools expect students to have when they start classes. To her, the gap everyone is talking about is not a question of black and white but of the "difference between children's potential and their performance."

"No matter how poor they are, when little kids start school, they are excited; they believe they are going to learn," Jackson said. "But unless schools give them the background knowledge . . . so they can connect with what they study and feel confident, they begin to feel that school is a foreign place, and they give up."

For Junior Bailey, a senior in my Advanced Placement English class, school has never been a foreign place, a fact he attributes to his dad. "He has always been on me; it's been hard to get away with much," Junior said. He also told me that hardly any of his friends have their fathers living with them. "Their mothers are soft on them, and they don't get any push from home."

On parents' night a few weeks ago, I was thrilled to see Junior's dad, Willie Bailey, a star on T.C. Williams's 1983 basketball team, walk into my classroom. Willie told me that after seeing how the guys he grew up with were affected by not having their dads around, he promised himself that he would be a real presence in his son's life.

With more parents like Willie Bailey, someday schools might realistically talk about closing the gap between students' potential and their performance.

patrwelsh@gmail.com

Patrick Welsh teaches English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.

Add Comment
 
 

Note in the last paragraph of the article, how Archbishop Timothy Dolan talks of being challenged to "heroic virtue". It is a wonderful concept.


Wall Street Journal
MAY 11, 2009
Proudly Pro-Choice on Education New York's archbishop on schools and the challenges facing the Catholic Church. 
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY New York

For thousands of lower-income New York children caught in the city's failing public school system, any high-profile advocate for choice in education might seem to be heaven-sent. Perhaps this one is. His name is Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the newly appointed spiritual leader of New York's 2.5 million Catholics.

When I went to see Archbishop Dolan early on a midweek morning last month at the New York Catholic Center in Manhattan, his warm and gregarious personality had already been widely reported on. His beaming -- and may I say prominently Irish -- face had been plastered all over the front pages of local newspapers and on the evening news. We had learned early on that he believes in being a joyful shepherd, that he is an outspoken opponent of gay marriage and abortion, and that he likes baseball -- though he told me, with a roaring laugh, that he is "pro-choice when it comes to Mets or Yankees."

Yet the early press coverage leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what to expect from this 59-year-old St. Louis native, who inherits not only substantial political, cultural and religious influence in the largest city in the nation but also a lot of challenges. The Roman Catholic Church has long been an important part of the civic fabric of New York. But in recent decades the trends have not been good. Catholic schools have been closing down, young people have been drifting from the faith, and fewer young men and women are entering Catholic Church vocations. What does this optimistic archbishop have up his sleeve?

The issue that most New Yorkers, Catholic or not, may be interested in is whether the diocese's 279 Catholic schools -- an educational lifeline to over 88,000 children -- can survive. More than 50 have closed down in the past 25 years, and those that are left often struggle to get by. Surely they would have a better chance if New York had an education voucher program like Milwaukee does? So I began our conversation by asking the archbishop to talk about the Milwaukee experience. His already radiant face brightened even more.

"We called it Choice in Education and it was a genuine blessing," he says, sitting up in his chair and leaning forward. "It began under Gov. Tommy Thompson, and the idea was that parents would have a choice as to where they would send their children. It was restricted in that it was just the city of Milwaukee, and the parents had to be under a certain income level. But it was so successful" he explains, that demand soon exceeded the cap of 15,000 students.

When that happened, Milwaukeeans wanted to go further. Archbishop Dolan says he was "part of a coalition, two years ago, that worked with Gov. [Jim] Doyle to expand the cap to 22,000 students." As of now it serves about 20,000 children of families that meet strict income limits. "It's been a tremendous boost," he says, smiling enthusiastically.

The archbishop says that "philosophically," as much as practically, the Milwaukee diocese celebrated the voucher program. "The Catholic Church has always been an ardent advocate for parental rights in education," he points out. "The experiment is now about 15 years old, and it is applauded by all sides . . . except," he notes in a more somber tone, "there [are] some who would attack it, particularly those associated with the public-school teachers lobby, which is very strong in Wisconsin. They still apparently believe that the government should have a monopoly on education."

Despite the power of that lobby, the archbishop says "the parents and the wider community appreciate [the voucher program]," and he stresses that it is popular with more than just Catholics. "The coalition that supports it is made up of, yes, Catholics, but also many Jewish leaders, civic leaders, many politicians, people who just love and support the community with no religious background at all. There seemed to be a widespread appreciation that this was a tremendous boost to the Milwaukee community, and of course we're always hoping to expand it."

Yet what has been possible in Milwaukee may not be in New York. "The challenge of keeping our wonderful Catholic schools strong, affordable, accessible and available," the archbishop says, is "all the more pressing here in New York because we don't have the blessing of vouchers." His next comment suggests that he doesn't expect them here anytime soon. "I know that the state of New York likes to consider itself kind of on the vanguard of enlightened progressive initiatives, but in this regard Wisconsin is way ahead."

Still, the archbishop is not deterred. After all, he reminds me, one of the greatest New York archbishops of all time, John Hughes, had a similar problem. "He got into a battle in the 1840s with what was called then the New York Public School Society, saying 'I'd like a portion of those [government] funds to educate our children.'" He lost that fight but went on to build the city's Catholic school system, which educated masses of Irish immigrants previously considered impossibly ignorant and unruly.

Hughes was continually short of funds, as the diocese is today, but Archbishop Dolan says this too can be kind of a blessing. "It's why the Catholic schools are scrappy," he says. "And in a way that's part of the genius of our schools: We are not rolling in dough. We have to fight for every dime; it becomes a communal endeavor. There is a sense of pride and ownership among the people because, darn it, we fought for this school, we love it, we scraped for it, we have mopped floors and painted classrooms, and we do not take this for granted."

When I rattle off the some of the dropping enrollment statistics in the diocese, the archbishop admits that the "schools can really cause us to go for the Maalox and Tylenol. But," he says, "what we have to ask ourselves is 'Are they worth it?' And we say you bet they are. They're worth it because nobody does it better than the [Catholic] Church when it comes to education."

The archbishop admits that at times others in the Catholic Church don't share his enthusiasm. "Some priests and some bishops have lost their nerve when it comes to Catholic schools. [They've] almost said, 'boy they were nice and we'll do our best to keep the ones that we got but more or less they are on life support and I guess in 50 years they're going to fade away.'" The archbishop says his predecessor Cardinal Egan rejected this line of thinking and he does too. "Its time for us bishops to say: these . . . are . . . worth . . . fighting . . . for," he says, emphasizing each word slowly. "These are worth putting at the top of our agenda, and these are worth something not only internally for us as a church as we pass on the faith for our kids and grandkids, but it is also a highly regarded public service that we do for the wider community. And darn it we do it well, we have a great tradition of it and we're not going to stand by and see it collapse."

So what's the plan? The archbishop, who seems to me part theologian, part historian, and part marketing guru, is already thinking about ways to explore and expand private funding initiatives such as the successful Inner City Scholarship Fund.

He is sure that there can be "wider participation from New York's philanthropic, business and civic community." There are many "who so love the New York community" and see education as "one of the finest investments we can make in the future of our community." Often, he says, givers are not Catholic. "I met someone a week or so ago who said if you ask me my religion I'd probably say I am an atheist, but I love Catholic schools because they do such a sterling job and I am going to support them."

If Archbishop Dolan can save and perhaps even revive the city's Catholic school system, he will be a hero to all of New York. But while he's working on that, he has two other problems that are troubling for the Catholic Church. The first is the growing number of 20- and 30-somethings, raised in the faith, who are not attending Mass or getting married in the Catholic Church. The second is the sharp drop in people choosing Catholic Church vocations.

I asked him what he thinks has gone wrong. For starters, he says, the Catholic Church for too long took for granted the Catholic culture, "when it was presumed that you would go to Sunday Mass, that you would marry a Catholic and be married in the Catholic Church, when it was presumed that you would always remain in the faith, with tons of priests and nuns and Catholic schools to serve you."

Those days are gone, and now he says its time to "recover the evangelizing muscle that characterized the early church." This means putting an end to the "wavering" that has too often characterized the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council and a return to a clear and confident message.

"Very often even the word Catholic even the word church has had a question mark behind it," he says. "Does it know where it's going? Does it know what its teaching? Is it going to be around? There was a big question mark. A young person will not give his or her life for a question mark. A young person will give his or her life for an exclamation point."

This "recovery" in confidence, he says, began under John Paul II and continues under Pope Benedict XVI. In his new role, Archbishop Dolan intends to keep it going. Being a Catholic is an "adventure in fidelity," he insists. The Catholic Church, he says, has "a very compelling moral message. She calls us to what is most noble in our human makeup, dares us to become saints, challenges us to heroic virtue."

Ms. O'Grady writes the Journal's Americas column.





Add Comment