![]() “We’re teaching the kids logic and rhetoric and how to communicate, how to understand fallacies,” Bill chimed in. “They have to go and fight and they have to be the future leaders … what a beautiful way for them to start as teenagers to learn about freedom.” “We can’t keep our kids in a bubble,” Azin said. ![]() When new students come to the academy, Azin said that one of the things they often say is: “Oh, I’m allowed to ask questions, I’m actually allowed to discuss things with my teacher and disagree with my teachers?” To which they respond: “Absolutely, this is where you learn how to think, not what to think.”įar from giving in to the moral and religious relativism so prevalent in the modern education system, the Learys said that giving students the freedom to question teachings strengthens their faith and equips them to defend it. Every student at a Chesterton academy undergoes four years of math, science, literature, philosophy, languages, history, art, music, drama, and even choir and ballroom dance. The goal is to train students to be well-rounded and knowledgeable Catholics. Chesterton says, ‘Thinking means connecting things,’ and we make a great work of doing that so that the four-year curriculum is very intricately woven, so everything is tied together.” “We don’t only teach religion in a theology class, we teach it in literature and history and in art and even in the science classes,” Ahlquist said. Even more unique, Ahlquist said that each course ties in with the other so that what a student is learning in history then connects to what he or she is learning in philosophy, math, or science. What Do Students Learn at the Chesterton Academies?Įvery class is taught in the Socratic method of question and answer. The secret to the academies’ success, Ahlquist believes, is that they fill an urgent need and hunger of parents and students for a school that truly teaches and lives out the joy of the faith. Just 16 years later there are 59 schools in 25 states and four countries, with 10 more academies expected to open in the fall. “Many a school,” he went on, “boasts of having the latest ideas in education when it has not even the first idea for the first idea is that innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience.” But in school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself,” he wrote in his book What’s Wrong with the World. “It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. ![]() Meanwhile, at the heart of every Chesterton academy, Ahlquist said, lies the Eucharist, the sacraments, and adherence to tried and proven classical education methods.Ĭhesterton, a renowned 20th-century Catholic author best known for such works as the Father Brown series and “Orthodoxy,” is often referred to as “the apostle of common sense.” A man deeply in tune with both his faith and the world, many of Chesterton’s writings can seem prophetic to the state of the world today.Īs early as 1910, Chesterton decried the Western education system for often adopting curricula younger than the students themselves. Ahlquist lamented that many Catholic schools today follow the example of public schools, bucking deeply Catholic traditional ideas of education in favor of new, often experimental, modernist education ideas.
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