Posted on 11/23/2025 4:41:21 PM PST by aspasia
Ten years ago this month, I announced that Wyoming Catholic College—where I was then serving as president—had made the deliberate decision to forgo participation in federal student loan and grant programs. Our reason was simple: We believed that accepting federal dollars might compromise our mission to “immerse students in the Great Books (the Western canon), the Good Book (the Bible), and God’s First Book (nature).” In other words, we chose to reject federal funds for the sake of defending classical education.
What a difference a decade makes. Today, classical education is no longer something to simply be defended—it is ascendant, popular, and on the verge of becoming mainstream. According to multiple reports, America’s service academies are poised to announce any day now that they will begin accepting the classic learning test (CLT) this admissions cycle.
The resurgence of classical education and its renewed use in classrooms and homes across the country is excellent news, not only for the revival of a warrior ethos in America’s officer corps but for the future of every American citizen. A new Golden Age will require strong families and good schools, and classical education is essential to revitalizing both institutions.
First and foremost, classical education restores a true anthropology—a true vision of the human person. Whereas most schools today treat students like data points or “human capital”—faceless future workers to be plugged into a failing bureaucracy—classical education considers each child a gift from God, made in His image, and capable of living a good and virtuous life.
(Excerpt) Read more at modernagejournal.com ...
Good news, but the hope is that it not just be confined to one segment of the population but become universal again...because that WAS “basic education” back in the day. For people from every walk of life. And if you wanted to be REALLY educated, you practically became fluent in Latin/Greek sometimes Hebrew.
This was prior to all the secularizing of the ivies, the industrial/scientific takeover of everything, etc...
Posted this back in 2021. And to think it was two *leftist* professors lamenting the removal of the Cassics department at Howard University. Beautifully explained why such a tragedy. (And of course Classics shouldn’t be confined to a “department” in the first place.)
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3952346/posts
And this is the late Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley explaining what the purpose of education is in the first place — not a ticket to a job, but to seek the meaning of being human within the context of eternity:
Re: job training, that’s what apprenticeships and internships are for. But regardless of whether one does a blue collar or white collar trade, we should still be expected to be literate and have a well rounded humanities foundation. Nowadays humanities takes a total back seat to “STEM.”
“Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide?” (by just trying to be like Harvard instead of embracing its foundational ethos of Catholic scholarship.)
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Articles/Is-Georgetown-University-Comitting-Suicide.htm
Talk about being vindicated.
I just looked at their catalogue. They teach one foreign language—Latin. It looks like all the students take two years of Latin.
Could say whoop-do-doo. That's like saving coins in piggy bank for two years when you know you'll need a couple million to retire.
The humanities have been hijacked.
They do not teach timeless and universal ideas, our Western heritage, judeo-christian values.
Time tested principals that lead to success.
They teach feminist, socialist, egalitarian, eco lunacy. Ideas that get you bankrupt, sick, commit atrocities on your fellow man and die a lonely death.
Funny you should mention the secularization of the ivies. The once venerable Notre Dame just recently announced it was divesting itself of its unique Catholic mission and would no longer have a religious mindset.
It is fine for colleges to return to classic education and I support that but unless you start teaching kids basic skills in their first four years of education you continue to have problems.
And for the low IQ posters who want to whine about how it is the children and parents fault, shut up.
American children start school ahead of the curve in skills and enthusiasm and by four grade they are behind everyone.
The overarching problem is not with the parents, the children or the funding. It is with the stupid system that you are supporting.
I'm with you on that.
I'm also firm advocate of parental education, because the brain is disposed to the most efficient at linguistic development at an early age on the lap of their parent (even sibling).
Today you can’t take a humanities course without having a mediocre painter woven into the curricula because she’s female from that era, a poet that wrote mediocre poems but is black, and of course some eco, LGBTQIA plug has to be added in also.
The humanities and pseudo sciences (psychology and sociology) have become the area where all the socio-economic-political brainwashing is done.
By skills do you mean math? reading?
An argument can be made for social skills, especially in our tech rampant age.
Terrible! So what is Notre Dame going to identify as then? Just a generic private school?
I know Georgetown is historically a “Jesuit” Catholic school.
And that Notre Dame is “Order of the Holy Cross.”
Not sure how different both approaches to education are/were.
Grammars are dead ends and do not hold the keys to America's future. Translation, however, of the wisest literature Western civilization has produced, that's the skill worth staying busy with until the end.
BTW, do you need a grammar to speak English?
WCC has a curriculum for a certain niche of students. Those who don’t find it attractive have hundreds of other colleges to choose from. If they did not offer Latin I would have questioned their commitment to a traditional classical education. If they offered Greek too that would be even better....the most perfect of human languages (according to John Adams).
Thomas Paine thought there was no need to learn dead languages like Latin and Greek because everything of value had been translated.
The humorist Stephen Leacock, who had a classical education, boasted that he could take a page of Latin or Greek and tell at a glance which it was.
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