A classical education will give our children the beginning of the education every educated person in Western Civilization once received, a classical or liberal arts education. The idea is to educate the students so that they develops all the powers of their souls, and their minds are formed, strengthened, and developed. The end of this educational process is wisdom. Man desires by nature to know, and that means we want to have not only the facts, but the reasons for the facts. We want to think about the most noble things, the most interesting in themselves.
Therefore, the goal of education is to teach children how to think; to help them learn the art of learning. If children learn how to learn, they will be to master any subject. Thinking can be done well or badly, but one can be taught to do it well. In large measure, the role of the teacher of grade and high school children is this: teaching children to think well. It begins in wonder and aims at wisdom.
The tools of learning, through which children learn the art of learning, are acquired by concentrating, at each stage of intellectual formation, on the areas of development that are appropriate to that stage in the child’s intellectual and spiritual development. Further, all we do will be faithful to the doctrine and teaching of the Catholic Church, which shall enlighten and inform all the areas of the curriculum.
“Creating the ability to think is our goal in a classical curriculum; we want our children to acquire the art of learning. It is not the number of facts they are acquainted with that measure the educational success, but what they are able to do with the facts: Whether they are able to make distinctions, to follow an argument, to make reasonable deductions from the facts, and finally, to have the right judgement about the way things are.”
Saint Therese Carmelite School 