“We’ve got pastors who say, ‘I’m starting, or just started, a classical education school, or we’re renewing our Catholic school and we want to get our faculty on this.’ We have a lot of schools that want to send their teachers as cohorts. Gray said they already have a sizable class signed up for the inaugural program. “Bishops were asking us: Hey, can you provide us with something more focused on education? It’s a huge need,” he said. Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, told CNA there was considerable interest in the program prior to its development. The program is “grounded in Scripture and Catholic doctrine,” Blum said it “offers pedagogical training from a Catholic and classical perspective” and allows students to specialize according to their own area of teaching, with concentrations in grammar school, classical pedagogy, humanities, science and math, and catechetics. Catholic schools who adopt this model of curriculum do so with an emphasis on Catholic teaching, scriptural study, and abstract yet well-studied concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty.Ī growing number of Catholic institutions have been adopting this style of education: The Diocese of Marquette, Michigan, for instance, became in 2020 “the first in the nation to fully move all of its schools to a classical Catholic curriculum.” Schools in Colorado, Washington state, Kentucky, and numerous other states have moved toward this model in recent years as well.īlum said the new Augustine Institute program was founded with “an explicit commitment to the new evangelization and the embrace of more traditional forms of education.” He said though that style of pedagogy is most often referred to as “classical,” the more accurate descriptor is “Catholic liberal education.”
Many Catholic schools across the country are increasingly turning to “classical” forms of education, which focuses on liberal arts such as grammar, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, and other historically celebrated forms of learning. It hopes to add several hundred to its newly formed MA in Catholic Education program, which is debuting with a “soft launch” in October.Ĭhristopher Blum, the institute’s provost as well as a professor of philosophy and theology, told CNA the program is meant to serve as “a contribution to the ongoing renewal of Catholic schools.” The institute, founded in 2005 as a Catholic graduate theology school, currently hosts a little over 300 students. The Augustine Institute in Denver says on its website that the organization exists to serve “the formation of Catholics for the new evangelization” by “equip Catholics intellectually, spiritually, and pastorally to renew the Church and transform the world for Christ.” Catholic institution is debuting an education degree program meant to train up teachers and administrators in what one official says is the “embrace of more traditional forms” of Catholic education. Newsroom, / 07:00 am (CNA).Ī western U.S. Null / Credit: Billion Photos/Shutterstock
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