Joseph Pearce
Taken together, Louis Markos’ “Passing the Torch” and Michael Ortner and Kimberly Begg’s “The Catholic School Playbook” provide invaluable assistance in navigating the turbulent educational waters of our troubled times. They are also a sign of hope and a source of encouragement, and so are the hundreds of newly founded classical academies that are springing up across the land from sea to shining sea.

It was a century ago that G.K. Chesterton prophesied that the “coming peril” was “standardization by a low standard”. Nowhere has this prophecy been proved more true than in the field of education. This was brought home to me personally when I took my late mother on a “pilgrimage” to the two room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi in which Elvis Presley was born and had spent his childhood. To my surprise, I discovered the text of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” on the wall of one of the rooms. Perplexed by the apparent incongruity, I asked the guide on duty to explain its presence. I was told that Kipling’s poem would have been taught at the school that Elvis attended in the mid-1940s. Considering that Mississippi was the poorest state in the union at the time, it says a great deal for the quality of education in mid-century America that the poorest students were receiving such a rich education.
A similar proof of Chesterton’s prescience was brought home to me recently when a friend sent a copy of the Eighth Grade Examination for the schools of Bullitt County in rural Kentucky in 1912. Words that the students were expected to be able to spell included exaggerate, chandelier, bequeath, monotony, hyphen, antecedent, symptom, rhinoceros, adjective, architect, masculine, synopsis and eccentric. Today, more than a century later, one wonders how many public school educated eighth-graders would even have heard of these words.  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/04/restoring-humanities-education-not-dummies-joseph-pearce.html