The Pioneer Institute releases study on Common Core and Catholic schools

In collaboration with the American Principles Project, the Boston-based Pioneer Institute has released the study, "After the Fall: Catholic Education Beyond the Common Core," written by scholars Anthony Esolen, Dan Guernsey, Jane Robbins, and Kevin Ryan. The purpose of the study, as stated in the Executive Summary, is to take "a critical look at the issues and principles behind the Common Core movement and, in particular, the standards’ effect on and suitability for Catholic schools." It's a robust 40 page version of the 2013 letter more than one hundred Catholic scholars addressed to the nation's bishops concerning the implementation of Common Core in diocesan schools (coordinated by Robbie George and Gerry Bradley). More than half of the dioceses, including Boston, have adopted Common Core. 

The study presents and then refutes the most popular arguments in favor of the program in Catholic schools and then proposes an authentically Catholic alternative:  liberal arts education.  The study beautifully and effectively exhorts Catholic schools to retrieve their inheritance of virtue-based character education and the "soul-shaping and soul-expressing power" of great literature, among the many merits of classical Catholic education. 

From the study's preface, by Ambassadors Raymond L. Flynn and Mary Ann Glendon:

Realizing that combining humanities and the arts with religious instruction aids spiritual development, Catholic schools have traditionally provided a classical liberal-arts education that generations of grateful parents and students have prized. Through tales of heroism, self-sacrifice, and mercy in great literature such as Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, and the works of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Dante, and C.S. Lewis, they seek to impart moral lessons and deep truths about the human condition. The moral, theological, and philosophical elements of Catholic education that are reinforced by the classics have never been more needed than they are in this era of popular entertainment culture, opioid epidemics, street-gang violence, wide achievement gaps, and explosive racial tensions.

 

Common Core, on the other hand, takes an approach that is contrary to the best academic studies of language acquisition and human formation. It drastically cuts the study of classical literature and poetry, and represents what Providence College English Professor and Dante scholar, Anthony Esolen, calls a strictly utilitarian view of mankind, “man with the soul amputated.” It is devoid of any attention to “the true, the good, the beautiful.” It eliminates the occasions for grace that occur when students encounter great works that immerse them in timeless human experiences. Instead, it offers stones for bread in the form of morally neutral “informational texts.” The basic goal of Common Core is not genuine education, but rather the training and production of workers for an economic machine. We see this in the reduced focus on classic literature, and in the woeful mathematics standards that stop short of even a full Algebra II course – giving students just enough math for their entry-level jobs. The goal is “good enough,” not academically “excellent.”

...

All students ought to read Dante, Shakespeare, and Flannery O’Connor; those who do are better for it, regardless of whether they plan to become philosophers or welders. All students ought to study, or at least be given the opportunity to study, mathematics that allow them a sustained and detailed scientific investigation of creation. But Common Core seems to view “overeducating” students as a waste of resources, or, as its proponents say, “human capital.” In what looks like an effort to define human beings as mere objects or beasts, it aims to provide everyone with a modest, utilitarian skill set...

 

As the influence of religion diminishes, for the sake of our civilization itself, it becomes more urgent than ever to find ways to provide children with the fundamental intellectual, spiritual, and moral ideals necessary for humans to flourish. But Common Core moves in the opposite direction. Sterile informational texts and workforce training will not help children to learn how to be good human beings. And no free society can survive for long without cultivating character and competence in its citizens and public servants.

 

Common Core’s shift away from the moral and cultural patrimony of Western Civilization comes at a most unfortunate time, when increasing marginalization of religion in our society is taking a severe toll on the moral culture that sustains our American democratic experiment. Religion plays a pivotal role in sustaining our freedoms, upholding the rule of law, creating a culture of compassion for the disadvantaged, and fostering social cohesion. Even the professed atheist Jürgen Habermas recognized that Western culture cannot abandon its religious heritage without endangering the great social and political advances grounded in that heritage.

 

Kevin Ryan and Mary Ann Glendon sit on the Board of Trustees and Advisory Board, respectively, of my children's school--the first classical Catholic school in the Boston area, founded in 2013. St. Benedict's, and other schools like it, are a true education in freedom, and parents are catching on:  we will outgrow our current site this coming year. As the Pioneer Institute study shows, and Hillsdale education professor Jeff Lyman discussed in a presentation to the school community last night, once a student's natural faculties are perfected in the study of the liberal arts, that student can go on to learn anything -- even contributing in a meaningful way to the "workforce" (the be all and end all of Common Core)! But, far more essentially, the student educated in the classical Catholic tradition will learn what it means to be a human being with an eternal destiny--and, as such, how to live a virtuous life and thereby contribute to the common good. The timing of this study, in light of the abject moral failings of our presidential candidates, could not be better.