In this Common Core era, Saint Mary's Catholic High School stands out. To discover what makes Saint Mary’s so unique one only needs to look at our mission statement: The mission of Saint Mary’s Catholic High School is to provide a Liberal Arts education that forms virtuous young men and women who know the Truth and love the Good. Like every other college preparatory high school, we make sure our students are ready for whichever university they choose to attend, but our primary concern is not “career and college readiness” or the “challenges of a 21st century world.” On the contrary, our first concern is man's last end. Everything we do at Saint Mary’s—our courses, our campus ministry, our athletic competitions—everything—is oriented to this end. This is because we understand a fundamental truth that is too easily and too often forgotten: man was not created for career and college; he was created for happiness.
The happiness for which we have all been made is not the fleeting, superficial happiness of pleasure or wealth or power or fame. This happiness is the eternal happiness that comes only from fulfilling one's true purpose, of becoming, as Saint Pope John Paul II would say, “who we are." This is why our mission statement speaks of virtue and the liberal arts, but not of career and college readiness. Virtue and the liberal arts are at the heart of our mission and together they constitute the “uncommon core” of a Saint Mary’s education. Understanding these terms is essential to understanding the formation Saint Mary’s offers its students.
Virtue is often defined as "a habitual disposition to do good," but it can also be understood to mean “excellence.” In the intellectual realm, the good to which we are disposed is truth. Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics that all men by nature desire to know the truth. This—seeking and finding truth—is what intellects are for. Good intellects—that is, well-formed minds—do this excellently and habitually, with ease and with pleasure. In the moral sphere, the good to which our wills are drawn is goodness itself. Well-formed hearts love the good and habitually choose what is good for themselves and for others.
In order to habitually and excellently know truth and love the good, people must be free to fully exercise their intellectual and moral faculties. Those arts which enable men to do so are called the liberal arts. Today, when people refer to a "liberal arts education" they usually mean "not-STEM" (i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), but that is a very superficial understanding of the term.
Traditionally, there were seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These arts were divided between the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium (Latin for "three ways") consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the so-called "language arts." These arts are not subjects, per se, but are rather the prerequisite tools of language that must be mastered before specialized study can begin. In order to make sense of the world, one must be able to talk intelligently about it.
The first of the liberal arts, grammar, is concerned with how to communicate—how to make sense when using words to describe reality. The second, logic, deals with the arrangement of grammatically correct statements into arguments that are true. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It teaches how to arrange and present grammatically correct statements and logical arguments in the way most likely to convince an audience to agree with the speaker or do what he wishes.
At Saint Mary’s, students explicitly study the trivium as freshmen in their Grammar & Composition class and as sophomores in Speech & Rhetoric class, but because language is the foundation of learning, they employ these liberal arts in all their classes, most especially in their “Seat of Wisdom” seminar classes, which integrate the study of history and literature while making extensive use of Socratic discussions.
In contrast to the trivium—which deals primarily with language and the communication of ideas—the quadrivium (i.e. "four ways") equips students to quantify and measure the material world. The quadrivium is concerned with number (arithmetic), volume (geometry), extension in time (music), and extension in space (astronomy). These arts help students recognize patterns that occur in nature and in art and prepare students for all areas of study that make use of pattern recognition such as medicine, law, finance, all the sciences, and even sports. Most importantly, the quadrivium shows students clearly that truth exists and that it can be known with certainty.
Collectively, these seven arts form the basis upon which all other study is made possible. Through the study of the liberal arts, students learn how to think and how to communicate, how to recognize patterns and how to make connections between subjects. These habits are essential to being a well-formed human being, who not only knows facts and can perform certain functions, but who understands facts and sees their significance in relation to other truths. In other words, these habits help men become wise, not just smart. Animals can be trained, but only humans can be educated. The liberal arts help men and women as men and women become the best versions of themselves they can be.
Of course, a liberal arts education alone is insufficient for bringing man to his final, beatific end. As Pope Leo XIII writes in Divini Illus Magistri “every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound.” To achieve ultimate happiness one needs God's grace which comes to us through the Church and her Sacraments. Thankfully, Saint Mary’s is imbued with the Sacramental life and students can receive that grace every day.
Saint Mary’s is uniquely capable of educating the whole child. By providing an education that forms the hearts, minds, and souls of the young in virtue, Saint Mary's prepares young men and women to be receptive to God's grace and to recognize Him at work in all things that are good, true, and beautiful.
Dear Saint Mary’s Families,
As this is my fifth out of seven emails about technology, I realize that Lent is almost over, that we will shortly celebrate Our Risen Lord, and that you will no longer get Monday morning emails about technology. This week I wanted to take a look at technology in the classroom. I challenge you to read to the end of this letter, as one of the main problems with reading on a device is that readers just don’t like to scroll down.
At Saint Mary’s we are intentional about restricting technology from the classroom and school buildings. While some may view this as hindering the learning experience, there is a growing body of research claiming that technology is not only not helping the learning process, but that it is actually hindering it.
In Neil Postman’s book,Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman laments that technology has limited people's attention spans, noting that the Presidential Debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas was three hours long, filled with dialogue, argument, and actual debating of issues. The audience listened with rapt attention. They followed the rhetoric and heard the passion in the two men. They pondered the sustained argument, and evaluated the strengths and weakness of each candidate’s position. As a whole, Postman worried that technology would shrink attention spans, limit knowledge to the mere recall of facts, reduce news to a steady stream of sensational titles, and transform learning into a form of entertainment.
It is surprising to note is that in this book Postman is not complaining about the internet and social media, but about television and the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the TV screen. He would certainly be horrified by how technology is changing the way people think and consume information. Have you ever shared a news story without reading it? Have you ever failed to read an article to the end because scrolling down just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere? Does our lack of critical reading skills make fake news and sensational headlines the entertainment of our age? Technology is changing the way we think.
Many studies have noted that technology diminishes both our attention spans and our ability to recall facts. Even further, studies are coming out that show that the use of technology in the classroom does not help learning. The article Rethinking Classroom Technologystates, “Although students overwhelmingly preferred to read digitally and although they read faster when reading from a screen, believing that their comprehension was better, the results showed clearly that overall comprehension was better when students read from printed texts.” This studydone at West Point indicates that both uncontrolled and controlled technology in the classroom for note taking and other tasks hinders academic achievement.Click here to see why Silicon Valley executives choose schools that limit technology.
From West Point to Silicon Valley, those interested in education are avoiding technology, while tech companies push their devices with grants upon well-intentioned, but naïve educators that just want to keep up with the Joneses. The articles mentioned above point out that teaching and learning are human processes that require human contact.
At Saint Mary's, we use technology when it can serve us, not simply for its own sake. There are times when Saint Mary’s does encourage targeted use of technology: writing essays, researching topics, developing typing skills, and communicating with teachers and parents. Our teachers will also use projectors to display maps or artwork, though these projected images are a poor substitute for the beauty of a real life Michelangelo.
Some of us are old enough to remember a time without the internet and maybe we can feel or notice the effects of technology on our own thinking. Without our help, our children will not experience a time without screens. Left to their own devices, they will be left to their own devices. They need us to help them put down the screens and pick up, feel, and read a hardcover book; to perform experiments with real objects, touch real rocks, and look at the real moon. They need us to sit down with pencil and paper and work out the solution to a challenging math problem with them. They need actual people in actual classrooms to debate actual ideas, to grow in courtesy and respect, and to benefit from the wisdom of friends and teachers who truly care about them.
In Christ
