Is classical education the future of Catholic schools?

Classical Catholic schools are on the rise. Are they the best way forward?

For most of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, educators, students, and families alike were just hanging on to survive school in the midst of a pandemic. Some schools invested in new online software and hardware. Others implemented stringent sanitizing procedures and bought plexiglass shields to place between students and teachers. Nearly everyone was tired. It was not an ideal environment for innovation, new ideas, or new schools. But the Archdiocese of Boston decided to launch the planning of a brand-new school anyway, one that would marry classical education styles and content, dating back to the Greek and Roman Empires, with brand-new 21st-century technology. The archdiocese wanted to create a school designed to meet the needs of a new generation of Boston Catholic school students and families.

The school, now named Lumen Verum Academy, opened for classes in the fall of 2021 for grades six, seven, and eight. Lumen verum is Latin for “true light,” and Latin itself will be a cornerstone of a curriculum that borrows heavily from primary classical texts and languages while it minimizes the role of contemporary American and global scholarship.

Superintendent of Schools Thomas W. Carroll was an early and enthusiastic proponent of Lumen Verum, where students will work online from home on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays and participate in on-site activities on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Carroll is a Catholic convert whose sons attended traditional same-sex Catholic schools in New York. His most recent experience before coming to Boston was running the Invest in Education Foundation, a school choice advocacy nonprofit in New York. He also worked in former New York governor George Pataki’s administration.

 

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