ACADEMIC QUALITY IS STILL POSSIBLE

A message from a devout Catholic writer about a group of Protestants:

Today I received a request to write a short article on Pope Benedict XVI from a club called the De Tocqueville Society, in a small college in Northern Virginia. That such a request came was no surprise. Its provenance is, and cheeringly so. For this De Tocqueville Society is made up of a group of students at the new Patrick Henry College, founded by Mike Farris, the President of the Home School Legal Defense Association. More than ninety percent of the college's students were homeschooled. If there's a Roman Catholic in the bunch, I've yet to hear about it, and I've been to that campus twice to give lectures.

More on that in a moment. I could spend all evening singing the praises of PHC (as the students fondly call it), but let me share one discovery I made that should gratify Touchstone readers. The first time I spoke there, two years ago, I was stunned to meet young men and women who-who were young men and women. I am not stretching the truth; go to Purcellville and see it for yourselves if you doubt it; I believe my wife took a couple of pictures, just to quiet the naysayers. The young men stand tall and look you in the eye-they don't skulk, they don't scowl and squirm uncomfortably in the back chairs as they listen to yet another analysis of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or one of the healthier poems of Sylvia Plath. They're frank and generous and respectful, but they hold their own in an argument, and they are eager to engage you in those. They are comfortable in their skins; they wear their manhood easily. And the young ladies are beautiful. They don't wither away in class, far from it; but they wear skirts, they are modest in their voices and their smiles, they clearly admire the young men and are esteemed in turn; they are like creatures from a faraway planet, one sweeter and saner than ours.

Two years ago I spoke to them about medieval Catholic drama. They are evangelicals, half of them majors in Government, the rest, majors in Liberal Arts. They kept me and my wife in that room for nearly three hours after the talk was over. "Doctor Esolen, what you say about the habits of everyday life-to what extent is it like what Jean Pierre de Coussade calls `the sacrament of the present moment'?" "Doctor Esolen, do you see any connections between the bodiliness of this drama and the theology of Aleksandr Schmemann?" "Doctor Esolen, you have spoken a great deal about our recovery of a sense of beauty, but don't you think that artists can also use the grotesque as a means of bringing people to the truth?" "You've suggested to us that Christians need to reclaim the Renaissance as our heritage, yet we are told that that was an age of the worship of man for his own sake. To what extent is the art of that period ours to reclaim?" And on and on, until nearly midnight.

The questions were superior to any that I have ever heard from a gathering of professors-and alas, I've been to many of those. I mean not only superior in their enthusiasm and their insistence, but in their penetrating to the heart of the problem, their willingness to make connections apparently far afield but really quite apropos, and their sheer beauty-I can think of no better word for it.

A few weeks ago I was in town for another talk, on the resurrection of the body. The Holy Father had passed away. At supper, ten or fifteen of the students packed our table, to ask questions before the talk. They were reverent and extraordinarily well informed; most especially they were interested in the Theology of the Body. The questions on that topic continued after the lecture, and I had the same experience I'd had before, but now without the surprise.

And these are the young people who are devoting an entire issue of their journal to the thought of Cardinal Ratzinger, now the new head of the Roman Catholic Church. They are hungry to know about him; in the next week or two they will do what our slatternly tarts and knaves, I mean our journalists, have never done and will not trouble themselves to do, and that is to read what Benedict XVI has said, read it with due appreciation for their differences with him, and due deference to a holy and humble man called by Christ to be a light not only to Roman Catholics but to all the nations.

These students don't know it, but in their devotion to their new school (they are themselves the guards, the groundskeepers, the janitors; they `own' the school in a way that is hard to explain to outsiders), they live the community life extolled by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum; in their steadfastness to the truth they are stalwart participators in the quest set out by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio; in their welcoming of me and, God bless them, of the good Benedict XVI, they live in the true spirit of Lumen Gentium, that greathearted document of the council so often invoked for the lame tolerance of every betrayal of the ancient faith.

Source






A GOOD COMMENT FROM C.S. LEWIS

In my view there is a sense in which education ought to be democratic and another sense in which it ought not. It ought to be democratic in the sense of being available, without distinction of sex, colour, class, race, or religion, to all who can-and will-diligently accept it. But once the young people are inside the school there must be no attempt to establish a factitious egalitarianism between the idlers and dunces on the one hand and the clever and industrious on the other. A modern nation needs a very large class of genuinely educated people and it is the primary function of schools and universities to supply them. To lower standards or disguise inequalities is fatal.

If this sounds harsh, I would observe that the opposite policy is really devised to soothe the inferiority complex not of the idlers and dunces but of their parents. Do not be in the least afraid that those who live out their school-days-which should be brief-on the back bench of the lowest class will suffer any trauma when they see promotion and honours and official ap-proval going to the diligent minority. They are stronger than it. They can punch its head and kick its stern. All the distinctions they really care about-the popularity and the success in games-go not to it but to them. They enjoy their school-days very much. Our real problem is to see that they impede as little as possible the purposes for which school really exists.

More here






ANOTHER GOVERNMENT SCHOOL ATTEMPT AT A COVERUP

An administrator at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School faces discipline for failing to contact police about an alleged sexual assault on campus, district sources said Wednesday. All the district would say officially was that "corrective action" had been taken against the administrator, whom police have identified as the dean of students at the Bayview District school. However, sources familiar with the case say the dean has been counseled and still faces unspecified disciplinary action.

Police say they have launched a criminal investigation into why the dean didn't call them immediately when a distraught 14-year-old girl told him April 6 about an incident in a school bathroom involving a 14-year-old boy. Although upset, she told the dean that nothing had happened, said district sources who spoke on condition they not be identified. The dean called a parent and sent the girl home on a bus.

Instead, she went to the Taraval police station and reported that she had been forced to perform oral sex on the boy. The boy has since been charged in juvenile court with sexual assault and faces an expulsion hearing. The Marshall dean told police that he had been conducting his own investigation of the girl's accusations, police said. The dean has told investigators he intended to report the matter but wanted to do more fact- finding. State law requires that school officials notify police promptly when they suspect a crime has been committed on campus.....

Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is out of town and could not be reached for comment. The senior member of the school board said he wanted a full accounting of how the Marshall assault allegation had been handled. "The district needs to get to the bottom of it," said board member Dan Kelly. "The district needs to be sure that every principal, every administrator needs to report sexual assault in a proper way. "If this report is correct, it's a very serious failure of the staff of Thurgood Marshall school," Kelly said. "No question about it."

More here

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************