In 2008 a new independent Catholic school opened in the American state of Minnesota. Named the Chesterton Academy, its co-founder was Dale Ahlquist, President of The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Dale spoke at last year’s Australian Chesterton Conference on the remarkable expansion of Chesterton schools throughout America and internationally.
At this year’s conference – on Saturday, 1st November, at Campion College – a key speaker will be Emily de Rotstein, Executive Director of the Chesterton Society in America and of the Chesterton Schools Network. Her husband, Nes, who is responsible at the Chesterton Society for developing international partnerships in education, will also speak at the November Conference.
In this article, which appeared originally in Gilbert, the official magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton, Emily explains the rationale of the Chesterton schools (now numbering more than 70 worldwide and 20 additional schools in development). She outlines their governing philosophy and daily practices. At a time when classical Catholic schools are growing in Australia, the visit by Emily and Nes is especially welcome.
More than one hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton pointed out that education was in a state of decline and disarray, and that everyone knew it. The astonishing thing is that schools were in far better shape at that time than they are now.
Most students studied Latin and the Classics. They were amazingly well-versed in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. They could write coherent essays with good grammar and sophisticated literary allusions. They could solve complicated math problems on paper, or even in their heads, that would cause most of today’s students to look around for their calculators.
The inability to imbue even general knowledge to students has been compounded by an increasing emphasis on specialization, as students become narrower in their focus at very early ages.
If a student shows an inclination toward the humanities, he is steered away from the sciences and vice versa. Subject matter has become increasingly fragmented and students are learning smaller and smaller bits of it.
Unfortunately, our schools suffer from serious problems beyond the lack of content in the curriculum. We have moved from a mere absence of moral unity to a more or less open assault on morality. One wonders if even the far-seeing Chesterton could have imagined high schools with metal detectors at the entrances and contraceptives openly provided to its students.
What Chesterton certainly did see is that the entire educational system was bound to keep falling apart because there was nothing to hold it together.
During the all-important high school years, young people are going through physical and emotional changes and grappling with life’s biggest questions. It is a crucial time to learn the “permanent things,” the genuinely unchanging standards by which everything else is measured and against which they can test every idea they encounter both now and later. The vast majority of today’s high schools are doing nothing to serve young people in this giant task.
Rather than sit around complaining about this problem, two men decided they had to do something about it themselves. They had all the motivation they needed: they
were parents.
Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, and small business owner Tom Bengtson got together and founded a new high school. As Catholics, they knew that the faith must be the foundation of learning, that all knowledge must have an eternal reference point, and that every truth is connected to the ultimate Truth.
They also knew they wanted to restore classical learning and create an integrated curriculum, to put back together what the schools had put asunder, so that students could learn how to be complete thinkers (and speak in complete sentences). They wanted to counter the prevailing cultural trend that was anti-life and anti-family. And finally, they wanted to solve one of the most scandalous problems of modern education: its catastrophic costs. The Chesterton Academy was the result.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
G.K. Chesterton
Naming the school for G.K. Chesterton was an obvious decision for many reasons, not just because one of its founders is more than a little connected to Chesterton. In Chesterton’s prophetic view of education, he represents the ideal of the complete thinker. He is also a defender of the Faith, and of the very traditions that we have neglected to the point of our present demise. G.K. Chesterton epitomizes Catholic joy.
What is the Chesterton Academy model? It begins with a classical, integrated curriculum. At the risk of name-dropping, here are some of the people its students meet: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Teresa of Avila,
Dostoyevsky…and G.K. Chesterton.
They study the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, with some helpful exposure to the Church Fathers. History, literature, philosophy, and theology are braided together. But the sciences and the humanities are also intimately connected, so that the logic of math is seen in philosophy, and God’s handiwork is seen in the sciences.
Faith and reason meet in every class. Equal emphasis is given to the arts, so that every student learns to draw and paint, sing in the choir, act on the stage, give speeches, and debate.
And learning Latin helps one learn English. Each year of studies builds on the previous, so that by the end of senior year (the final year of high school), students are articulate, clear-thinking, well-rounded, and, very importantly, joyful human beings. As Chesterton says, “There is a whole truth to things, and in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.”
Each day at Chesterton Academy begins with Mass, and the calendar includes religious pilgrimages, spiritual retreats, pro-life activities, and fascinating guest speakers. The academy’s ultimate responsibility is to the parents of its students; we administrators in turn rely heavily on their participation in the school.
The unity of purpose, the underlying delight in life and learning, the pervading sense of family in the whole operation, and the obvious and fruitful results of our efforts are, in a word, thrilling.
How do we do it? We have a clear idea of what we want. We know there is nothing more important than the souls of our children. We know that whatever we do must be done for the glory of God.
How do we make it affordable? We have a commitment to frugality. We do not spend money that we don’t have.
In the early years, we rented classroom space from a school district in a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis. We keep parents actively involved. We have developed a large network of volunteers. We pay a core faculty full-time salaries, and we supplement this with part-time teachers who are willing and able to share their talents for less. The mix of full-time, part-time, and volunteers provides a constant freshness, as they all have to stay in close communication with each other to maintain the integrated curriculum.
We keep our tuition low, but we do provide financial assistance to those with proven need. And while we keep our costs low as well, we still need to supplement our revenue with donations.
We receive little to no support from the State or from the Church. This independence gives us the freedom to implement exactly the kind of curriculum we want. And we hope that by delivering impressive results, Chesterton Academy will prove to be a model that others can follow.
G.K. Chesterton once observed that “we are children of light, and yet we sit in darkness.” It is time to start bringing light to what is today the darkest of all places: the classroom.