Skid- Proof Catholic Education

Flipping the canvas loafer over, I puff my lips out noisily, shaking my head over the smooth rubber sole.  “Absolutely no traction,” I tell my young son in aggravation, wondering how much longer he will put up with this unwelcome expedition to the mall shoe store.  Once again, I ponder the idea of just handing over my credit card and paying for these flimsy, trendy shoes. Euphemistically described as moccasins (I imagine the people of the Five Nations who first inhabited this region giggling in contempt), these shoes pop up everywhere, particularly on the feet of Catholic children as they shuffle through the school hallways. I can’t picture my kid leaping the gushing rivulets at the school crosswalk wearing bedroom slippers.  But have I got a better option?

I don’t remember my mom having this problem as she outfitted her children in school shoes back in the late 80s and 90s.  Money, certainly, was a pressing issue with our large family.  However, I doubt that she endured one moment’s suspicion that the stipulated “brown or black oxfords” purchased for my very active brothers would fall apart before the end of the school year.  Shoes had heft and tread and were built to last.

Similarly, my mother could be confident in the Catholic education imparted to the younglings who attended our small-town K-8 school, where they were doctrinally bolstered through the severe mercies of a tiny Sister of St. Joseph, a stickler for the precise loops and whorls of cursive script and an inveterate enemy of sloppy theology.  After explaining to us that the Trinity was “three Persons in one God,” she asked us if we understood how that could be.  After we all nodded solemnly, she tartly informed us that it was a Mystery beyond our comprehension.  We meekly filed that note away with the other sacred things that hovered solemnly and invisibly around us in the silence before weekly school Mass—a stillness that we knew better than to break with idle chatter.

We completed our assignments with pen and paper, learning to take painstaking notes from a blackboard (transferring in second grade from a public school which had used green boards, I was mystified by its exotic charcoal hue).  In middle school, we were given access for an hour a week to the “state-of-the-art” computer lab and its massive monitors, where we fled from the Troggles in Number Munchers or attempted to race through Oregon Trail before the bell rang.  There were no SMART Boards, no Chromebooks, and no “6-7” memes gleaned from dystopian rap songs.

In eighth grade, many of us met in the school cafeteria, with our parents, outside of school hours, for a multiple-session chastity program called Love and Life.  Male volunteers led sessions for the boys, and female ones provided guidance for the girls.

It wasn’t a perfect education, but it was one deeply rooted in the ancient tradition of Catholic scholarship and virtue.  We were held to high standards, and though we didn’t always meet them (I chuckle ruefully remembering Sister’s irritable promise to “hang you, Tommy H., from the lights!”), there was an unspoken understanding that these rules were not suggestions scrawled on flimsy paper but codes inscribed in everlasting stone.

Fast forward to Catholic schooling in 2025—in the midst of nationwide teacher shortages, school systems hire those who have the credentials but are not necessarily committed to the Church’s evangelical mission.  Even many who were properly catechized in their youth have not developed the facility for reacting instantly and with conviction to the overwhelming spiritual battery drawn up against them.  The forces of darkness have done their utmost to flatten the distinction between good and evil, to confuse and confound the gatekeepers of Catholic education, and to distract our young from the deeply buried diamond of Truth, substituting for it a flashy neon banner proclaiming, “Be Young, Have Fun.”  When media-saturated children show up in the classroom shaped by flashy and ever-changing small-screen graphics, glib ideological sound bites, and even glamourization of the occult, many educators lack the spiritual backbone to curb, to correct, and to inspire their charges to struggle for sanctity.

I know from experience as a middle school religious education leader how difficult it can be to speak the truth.  It’s much easier to speak in love, or what we would like to think is love, but is in fact protection of our own egos.  But the dire question remains–if the true aim of Catholic education is the salvation of souls, what kind of resistance are we providing our children to a culture which threatens to propel them into a life of dangerous self-indulgence and eternal childishness?  Frustrated with the shortcomings of their local Catholic schools, some parents have chosen to pull their children out of school entirely and teach the little ones themselves.  However, not everyone is equipped to homeschool.  Must these parents simply shut their eyes to the slings and arrows of a flawed Catholic school culture?  Despite the toxic inertia common to school administrations everywhere, dynamic Catholic education is possible.  In a remote part of my own diocese, a small school made an unprecedented decision which changed the nature of Catholic education in the region.

About seven years ago, this rural school chose to veer away from the established cocktail of state standards and computer-based learning to adopt a Classical Catholic curriculum, grounded in the medieval tradition of the trivium and the quadrivium and guided by the good and great books that have built Christian civilization through the centuries.  Just recently, this school made local headlines for its soaring scores on the PMEA, a standardized test taken by millions of elementary school students across the nation.  Test administrators consider 60 percent to be the magic number for college readiness, but the students of this school in rural Pennsylvania are graduating with average percentiles of 85 in math, 92 in science and an electrifying 99 in English/language arts.  Significantly, they achieved these scores without any concerted effort to teach test-taking strategy.  Most critically, students at this school are receiving an unapologetically faith-based education that will teach them to seek first the Kingdom of God—the ultimate goal of every Catholic institution.

It would be logical to assume that other Catholic schools would snatch at the opportunity to enrich their own Catholic identity while maintaining an excellent academic record.  However, despite the overwhelming success of the Classical Catholic experiment, school administrators elsewhere in the diocese seem hesitant to explore the possibility of an alternative curriculum—a stance that is difficult to comprehend, particularly as parents deplore the de-Catholicization of their children’s schools.

“Education,” G. K. Chesterton opined, “is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to the other.”  At the quarter-knell of the twenty-first century, our society waits breathlessly at the crossroads to see whether its soul will be shaped by laptop-driven pedagogy, Taylor Swift, and K-Pop Demon Hunters, or something more enduring.  Long after today’s popular footwear has starting rotting in the landfill, the educational choices we make now for our young people will send forth reverberations.  Let us stop sending our children off down the Appalachian Trail wearing bedroom slippers.