Peace on a Mountaintop

     I know I should be posting on the recent acts of judicial tyranny in California, or on the op-ed piece that has been making our e-mail rounds, wherein Martha Nussbaum, lying and slandering and cobbling together an argument out of innuendos, inaccuracies, and deliberate ignorance, argues that we have no right to deny would-be polygamists their manifold vows before the justice of the peace.  I'll get to those soon, I vow.  But instead I'd like you to take a look at a boarding school for boys, Saint Gregory's Academy, in Elmhurst,  Pennsylvania, a few miles from where I grew up.  By all means check out the film.

     Over the weekend I visited St. Gregory's to give a talk, on the day before commencement, on piety and fatherhood, to the assembled student body (55 boys), their families, and the faculty.  The school is inspired by the teaching of the legendary professor John Senior, a Renaissance scholar who headed a Great Books program at the University of Kansas back in the late 1960's and the 1970's.  It was Senior's unshakeable conviction that the desire for beauty was essential to the development of the human mind.  That is why he required his students to commit poetry to memory, and to recite it publicly.  His program was tremendously popular, and richly answered that longing in the young for something higher to devote their hearts to than self-gratification or the pursuit of wealth and power.  Many of you no doubt know far more about that program than I do; and Professor Senior's goodness and wisdom are still reaping a fine harvest, at new high schools and colleges that trace their intellectual lineage back to Kansas.  I heard one delightful anecdote about a story that some duly horrified reporter for a Kansas City newspaper wrote on the program.  Apparently, students who enrolled in it and who had had no discernible attachment to religion found themselves often turning towards the faith that inspired Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and the rest.  So the newspaper ran a series of pictures above the story, showing, panel by panel, the terrible metamorphosis of a perfectly ordinary hippie into -- not a souse in a drying-out hospital, or a corpse, or a business executive -- a monk.  Eventually the university trustees shut the progam down, but the damage, alas, had been done.

     And at Saint Gregory's, too.  Perfectly ordinary boys who would be ignored or despised at most schools these days there mature into fine young men, strong in the faith, and blessed with deep friendships.  All the boys study Latin, all four years.  All learn music, singing old ballads a capella, and playing musical instruments.  All learn to juggle (!).  In fact, I was regaled with a juggling show that was as entertaining and impressive as anything I've seen professionals do -- one hour of acting, singing, music, juggling, riding unicycles, and really fine physical comedy.  All serve at the Latin mass.  The curriculum seems particularly strong in the humanities and in the more abstract approaches to science: Euclid, physics, astronomy.  It's the old trivium and quadrivium, brought back to life.  All the boys play rugby, too, and this little school managed to win the district championship against schools twenty times its size.  The boys do most of the groundskeeping and janitorial work, and much of the cooking, too.  All that, and there's a woodworking shop and a sculpture studio.

     That rugby championship, though, is most intriguing.  It's an inspired choice, to have the boys concentrate on rugby and soccer.  Rugby especially is a sport that requires no unusual hand-eye skills, and no long experience.  It's quick to learn, and anyone with a body can learn to play it.  The result is that the boys are not separated into the lucky few who are good at sports and the rest who sort of disappear.  Some of the boys may arrive at St. Gregory's stronger or faster than others, and no doubt some leave that way too.  But when everybody plays rugby, and plays it all the time, then unless some serious physical ailment gets in the way, everybody is going to end up impressively strong.  The same thing happens to boys on farms, and used to happen in boot camp.

     And that makes me guess that something similar can happen with the exercise of the intellect.  Not that any combination of curriculum and moral discipline can turn Ordinary Joe into Albert Einstein.  But it can turn Ordinary Joe into a man capable of reading the classics of our heritage, discussing our history, expressing well-informed opinions about man's nature, and working at his trade with skill and diligence.  At a school like St. Gregory's, you can see how the Ordinary Cleons could have built ancient Athens, or how the Ordinary Quinti could have grown Rome from an upriver village to the ruler of the Mediterranean.  Give the young people Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare.  Give them a life healthy for soul and mind and body.  How can you fail to raise graduates who make their contemporaries from other schools, even the valedictorians, look paltry and puerile?

     And I haven't even mentioned the most important thing of all: their faith in Christ.

     Some addenda to the previous post:

     The total cost of a year at Saint Gregory's, including room and board, is $11,000.  That is an amazingly good deal.  Did I mention that the school is located on the edge of the Pocono Mountains?

     Graduates of Saint Gregory's have founded a literary journal called The Catholic Idler.  I'm not sure if it's available on-line.

     In the first issue of the Idler, there's an article on Hillaire Belloc that incidentally illustrates a whole lot that is wrong about the way we raise our youth, and a lot that is right about Saint Gregory's.  It seems that when Belloc was serving as a young man in the French army, he met an American woman with whom he fell passionately in love.  Once discharged from the army, Belloc sold his beloved complete set of the works of Cardinal Newman to scramble up the money for boat fare across the Atlantic.  He landed in New York, and walked across the continent to San Francisco, supporting himself by manual labor.  When he arrived at the young lady's door in California, he proposed to her on the spot.  She agreed.  It was a long engagement -- they were married seven years later, when she was 25 and he was 26.  Read those last sentences again, carefully.  Unfortunately, their happy marriage was broken by the early death of Mrs. Belloc, at age 43; and Belloc had already lost a son in World War I, and would lose another in World War II.  But whatever you may say about the man's writings and his polemical opinions, Belloc lived.  He understood that mankind is built for adventure, in the medieval sense, earthy and mystical and humble and chivalrous all at once: you hit the road, and take what comes.

     Boys especially thrive on it: for many a boyish soul, the greatest danger is to face no danger.  Apparently Saint Gregory's accepts that as a part of the created good that young men present.  So their A-team of jugglers (with bowling pins, balls, tops, wands, swords, and fiery torches), clowns, and musicians (with accordion, bagpipes, Irish drum, guitar, and bassoon), accompanied by the English teacher who doubles as their instructor in those arts of legerdemain, will be bicycling from Barcelona along the foothills of the Pyrenees to Saint James of Compostela, earning their dinner and their lodging by performing on the streets.  (They are looking for donations, by the way, to defray the airfare for sixteen people.)  Imagine that ...

Comments

[Kyle]

You know, I think it would be a useful resource to create an index of all these exceptional schools that seem to be being run into by Touchstone editors all the time. I can't seem to find any of them by a mere search.

[Judy K. Warner]

Tony, I'd much rather hear about this school than about those other things. We desperately need to hear something positive when the country seems to be falling apart.

In that vein, I would like to report that at the Hillsdale College graduation last week a graduating student gave an excellent speech whose theme was virtue. No one laughed.

[tdunbar]

How wonderful! That's just the sort of school that I thought must exist somewhere. Seems to me that it would be better stewardship for parents to spend on tuition there and let college take care of itself than to settle for NEA high school and then spending money on college tuition.

[Beth]

Now more than ever I am sorry I never encountered Professors Senior and Quinn while I was doing my undergrad work at KU. I wasn't really in the English Department, where the Classics program was housed; I fell into an English major by taking courses I just wanted to take while doing my major in another humanities area. But while there were those who sneered at them, mostly in my recollection they were admired and loved by their students and their colleagues. In fact, I encountered a fair number of wonderful Christian men and women in the English Department, then and when I returned to grad school -- Max Sutton, Pete Casagrande, Margaret Arnold, and more . . . mostly gone now, either retired or died, and I could no longer recommend the KU English Department to anyone. But they had their influence on this agnostic foolish young woman, even when I wasn't in their classes -- salt and light that permeated the entire department -- and for that I am grateful.

I am delighted to hear of this school based on Professor Senior's ideals. It's sad that the university where he taught for so long, and was so beloved, cannot see fit to honor him even in merely retaining a Classics program. Yet one more reason I don't give to my alma mater . . .

[Eric]

Sounds like a fantastic school! Alas, I have two daughters. Is there a sister school for girls, or is anyone aware of a girls school with a similar approach to education?

[Chris Roberts]

That's amazing. Now I wish I were in High School again. And that there was a Protestant version of this.

[Will]

Ahh, I know that school! I grew up on nearby Lake Wallenpaupack. I actually met two of their Latin teachers in Rome this past summer. Good guys, I wish I got to know them better.

[Will]

Ahh, I know that school! I grew up on nearby Lake Wallenpaupack. I actually met two of their Latin teachers in Rome this past summer. Good guys, I wish I got to know them better.

[Bob]

Sounds great except for the compulsory games. Lewis would have loved that. . .

[Will]

Eh, I don't know where the double posting is coming from.

Chris, have you looked at http://www.accsedu.org/ for Protestant classical schools? Some good stuff is going on there and there are some all-boys schools, though I'm not sure you'll find juggling on their respective curricula.

[Bob]

Will, that's because juggling is clearly a popish invention! :-p

[Bill R]

And do my eyes deceive me? They actually wear suits to chapel? This is truly subversive!

[Bill R]

St. Gregory's harks back to the classical understanding of education as the formation of character, of the soul, rather than the modern understanding of education as the acquisition of knowledge and competence. Under the former understanding, knowledge and competence were the result, but not the goal, of education. Today, however, there can be no "goals" in the classical sense: each person decides for himself what the heck he's doing there. This article is a "good" (bad?) contrast to what Tony has related about St. Gregory's. True, it's college, not high school, but this is what today's high schools produce: distracted "students" who have barely a clue as to what being taught. (By the way, I think the "Josh Waitzkin" of the article was the protagonist of the wonderful movie, "Searching for Bobby Fischer.")

[Bob]

Josh Waitzkin of chess fame is thirty-one years old. Pretty sure that's not him. That would make him twenty-six when he graduated in 2003. I'm not so sure it's him. Could be, though.

[Dale Nelson]

The story of the Integrated Humanities Program is told in Robert K. Carlson's Truth on Trial: Liberal Education Be Hanged

http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Trial-Liberal-Education-Hanged/dp/1883357918

[T. Chan]

The school's website is here. They have posted their recruiting video on the main page--it's worth a look if you'd like to learn more about the school.

[T. Chan]

Eric:

There is no sister school, and I have not heard of any plans to start one. If you are Catholic you may consider some of the girls' high schools run by Opus Dei. They don't offer the same sort of education, but I've heard good things about the one in MA.

[T. Chan]

Ok, looks like the two urls now lead to the same website--it used to be that one led to the old webpage, while the other led to the new one.

[DGP]

No accreditation -- that takes guts. I admire them already.

[Bob]

No accreditation? How will they get into the university Dr. Esolen teaches at, then? :-(

[T. Chan]

Lack of accreditation for the school is not necessarily an obstacle for SGA grads; small Catholic schools don't have a problem accepting them. For other schools, they're in the same position as those who are homeschooled, so they just need to show evidence that they are qualified.

[Francesca]

>>Josh Waitzkin of chess fame is thirty-one years old. Pretty sure that's not him. That would make him twenty-six when he graduated in 2003. I'm not so sure it's him. Could be, though.<<

No, that's Josh Waitzkin the chess player. Josh postponed college for a few years to focus on chess, and then, while at Columbia, got into the Asian philosophy and Tai Chi that in part inform his motivational speeches and writing.

[Jenny Islander]

I think that a sister school should focus on, not sports, but giving girls something to do that leaves a visible mark on the world around them--something to accomplish. The same sense of channeling restless energy, but more suited for female adolescence. It should be something that requires exertion. The school might run a rescue and "upgrade" facility for unwanted horses or dogs, taking in badly bred, badly trained, surplus animals and turning out well-socialized and neutered rescuees (with routes to retirement farms for the broken down and the vet's office for the poor creatures in intractable pain). The girls would have a great deal of responsibility in several different areas, but everyone would share in the basic tasks of mucking, feeding, bathing. Or they could run a farm or a sawmill or form the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

[Abigail]

Eric,

I recommend Trivium School, a co-educational 7-12 school in Lancaster, Massachusetts. It's not technically a boarding school, but about a third of its students are from out of town, and board with families of local students.

http://www.triviumschool.com/

[T. Chan]

Opus Dei girls schools:
Montrose Academy
Willows Academy
Oakcrest School

[JB]

An April article in the Chronicle of Higher Education went even deeper than the New Prospect article on the subject of divided attention spans. UVA professor Mark Edmundson had some spot-on observations about his students:

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i27/27b00701.htm

Thoughts?

[JB]

Correction - the Chronicle piece was from March, not April.

[Judy K. Warner]

Thanks, JB, that is a good piece.

[Bill R]

"Thoughts?"

I couldn't live this way. It tires me out just to read about it.

[Charles Prezzia]

Just so everyone knows, I have never heard of lack of accreditation being an obstacle to higher education for any Saint Gregory's graduate. I'm from the Class of 2004, and many of my classmates are graduating from college this year and moving onto graduate studies this fall. One is becoming a Dominican, a second has a generous stipend for English grad school, a third is entering law school, and I'll be attending med school this fall.
And while these are all well and good in their own realm, St. Gregory's Academy is a great school because of its emphasis on the Mass, classical education, and camaraderie. While the school certainly is not for every young man, all parents with the available resources should take a long and hard look at sending their son there.