Meanwhile, boys
remain under siege. They live virtual lives. They underachieve and
underperform. They don’t go to college. The men they become are often crippled
by passivity and insipidity, cheating church and country of priests, fathers,
laborers, and leaders. One solution lies in making education lively enough to
bring boys back to life. A revival of Catholic boarding schools for high-school
age boys is central to this solution, for it allows life and education to be
liturgical, imparting the greatest impetus, the truest direction, and the
richest culture—which is the foundation of a happy life.
What Makes a
Boarding School Good?
The field of
education is thirsty for the wisdom of tradition. What is required is not
necessarily holding to particular historical forms, but recovering what is
essential in historical forms and returning to eternal principles. In popular
culture, there is a polemic against tradition and authority, often cloaked in
shrewd rhetoric or sheer repetition, but the mantra is communicated loud and
clear. Catholics must rise to defend the wisdom of tradition and show its
relevance, beauty, and vitality. One arena for this restoration is the lost
tradition and wisdom of the boarding school.
The idea of a
boarding school does not simply presume resident students. Neither does it
presume a reformatory for juvenile delinquents. Good boarding schools lead
students in an ordered rule of life. If teenage boys are to be rescued from
apathy, cynicism, and mediocrity, the following characteristics are
indispensible:
Catholic moral,
intellectual, and liturgical tradition
classical
education with poetry, music, the imaginative arts, and natural sciences
total abstinence
from computers, cell phones, iPods, iPads, television, etc.
competitive
athletic programs involving contact sports
facilities that
are simple and Spartan in a rural setting
Benedictine
balance of daily prayers and daily chores
small student
body and a faculty of friends
If a renaissance
in Catholic education is to take root and flourish, the necessity of these
principles have to be acknowledged. A blind and reactive insistence on
rationalist fundamentalism may be attractive in the short term, but will
ultimately lead to failure because it does not address what Scripture calls the
heart, the deepest spring of reason and desire. A boarding school that keeps
these precepts can open the shut-up hearts of boys to the realms of wonder and
wisdom in a familial yet formal arena geared towards providing teaching moments
in the structure of every hour of every day. Within this structure is the
potential for Catholic culture—a sense of community and the charity, service,
and sacrifice that flow from living and learning with others.
Why is Boarding
School Good for Boys?
Boys need
nourishing culture. They need retreat. They need pilgrimage. They need to have
and share an intense experience of the good in order to be moved by the good. A
good boarding school responds directly to the maladies of modern boyhood,
creating a lively culture and educating as a way of life. Certainly, parents
are the primary educators and the home and family provide his initial cultural
formation. A boarding school cannot replace this, but it can complement and
complete it. When boys become adolescents they are much more aware of, and in
need of, the social life of their peers.
There is a
long-standing tradition in schooling that favors single-sex education. It is a
model that was accepted by societies for centuries and preferred by many
saintly educators. Boys and girls live and learn better when they are educated
separately, especially once they reach adolescence. Besides that they are
different and deserve different approaches, pacing, and even different courses
of study, boys and girls, when educated together, greatly distract one another.
This is especially true for boys. Such distraction—whether from girls,
entertainment technology, or popular and pernicious media—retards education,
which strives to build up good habits through continual and concentrated
engagement. Boarding schools can provide such continuity because they render
education a continuous, focused, habit-forming thing.
A boarding school
rooted in the Catholic, classical mode of learning is good for boys damaged by
the utilitarian ugliness of modernity because it allows for withdrawal from the
prevailing culture into a traditional culture reinforced by peers. True
masculine education educates the whole man, and, to do this effectively,
asceticism is required—a withdrawal from the rampant impediments to growth and
health. A boarding school provides a wholesome, safe “micro-culture” in which
boys reinforce each other in virtuous formation, preparing to enter the wider
culture outside. There is a need for the positivity that such intensive,
immersive education provides. Boys can only grow and thrive when they are given
high ideals and the hope that they can bring these ideals into being in their
world, despite the careerism and sarcastic nihilism of the current culture.
Boarding schools
should focus on discipline that blends the militaristic and the monastic, thus
addressing the issues that boys vie with most. If boys lack drive, give them
independence and responsibility. If boys are isolated and neglected, let them
taste the camaraderie of community through athletics and shared activities.
Boys can only profit by leaving behind large coed classes and learning in a
concentrated male environment where they are free to be masculine, and where
their masculinity is addressed and cultivated. The common struggle between the
rigor of school and the relaxation of home disappears at boarding school, for
school and home become a single entity, focused on enacting the good. Boarding
schools are intrinsically appropriate for boys since the male trajectory
involves breaking away from home to search for adventure and occupation—a
trajectory often impeded by the unnatural, defeatist influences of the world.
How is Boarding
School Liturgical?
The rhythms of a
rightly ordered Catholic boarding school are liturgical because they frame out
and measure the interplay of God and man, body and soul, mind and heart. The
liturgy is the purpose of Christian life made present in time—it is
participation on earth in the life of the blessed. The end of education is to
free men from the seeming urgency and finality of worldly ends so that they may
pursue beatitude. Thus the liturgy is intimately connected to education. It has
an irreplaceable centrality in a school since only the liturgy can open the
school to the divine world, thus protecting it from the everyday world that
continually threatens.
The liturgy is a
school of praise. Education aims to open students’ eyes to the True, Good, and
Beautiful not as lifeless subjects in a textbook, but as objects worthy of
praise. The environment where such habits can be formed and fostered is best
achieved in a boarding school where life can be liturgical: a life of praise
and participation, providing direct and decisive remedy against the lethargy so
prevalent among teenage boys.
A boarding school
loses power in pedagogy, however, without strong spiritual leadership built
upon liturgy and the sacraments. One of the main points of a Catholic boys’
boarding school is to allow Holy Orders to sound its call. Key to this is the
role of a priest. Boys need a model they admire and want to emulate, presenting
the priesthood as essential and meaningful. No boy aspires to be an ineffectual
nice guy. In a boarding school, the example of the chaplain is crucial. A
virile chaplain dedicated to God and the good of others can plant seeds that
come to fruition as a boy matures.
Boarding schools
that are rigorous, vigorous, and devoted to Catholic excellence and cultural
enjoyment draw boys to maturity—an important goal in any boy’s education when
the prevalent plague is a refusal to grow up. Boarding schools offer lost boys
the chance to find themselves by revealing who they are—their strengths, their
weaknesses, their place in a community of friends, and their role in the
liturgy of eternal life unfolding in time. Ultimately, teenage boys respond well
to challenge and competition, to facing fears and rejoicing in achievement with
friends, and boarding schools provide this as no other school can in a secure
environment. In the end, boarding schools are better for most boys because they
are hard; and since they are hard, they make boys happy—which is the secret of
any real education.
Sean Fitzpatrick,
Crisis Magazine, march 9, 2015
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