A Natural Order of Living

Posted on November 18, 2020 by admin

Boys at Gregory the Great Academy discover Truth every living day. They wake to the sounds of nature and of man in harmony with nature: birdsong from an open window, a prefect’s call to Morning Prayer, the bustle of roommates readying themselves for the day. The natural world and their place in it is constantly present, never mediated by some electronic device.

Without first perceiving reality through the senses, a boy would find the abstractions of religion and philosophy extremely difficult. That is why we place such an emphasis on developing the imagination through three means: technological poverty, good (as well as Great) books, and time.

The natural order of learning directs us first to experience the real, to take delight in beauty and goodness, to discover truth, then to wonder at the meaning of each thing and how it fits into the wholeness of Creation. The only way to experience the sensible world is to encounter it with the senses; one can then add a little knowledge about things through learning what others think, but first a student must submit himself to Nature itself, unmediated by anything artificial. Gregory the Great Academy sits on nearly two hundred acres of woods and fields. Students are liberated by our policy of technological poverty and are encouraged to heed Wordsworth’s exhortation to “Come forth into the light of things / Let Nature be your teacher!” Having seen the glory and beauty of nature with their own senses, they cannot help but wonder at and begin to understand God’s love. This is fertile ground for further learning.

The second means to develop the imagination is through good as well as great books, read with delight and taught by imaginative teachers who are in love with them. Imaginative literature opens the mind to truths about human nature as well as the natural world. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood, foundational books for Freshman Literature, introduce boys to wonderful descriptions of nature and to the way human beings act in the world. A teacher who loves these books brings them to life; our freshman literature class is always rocking with laughter, thirsting for adventure, or pensive with “the tears of things” because they learn to reflect on the good, the true, and the beautiful. The good books, the habit of reflection, and the training of the imagination are the best preparation for the great books taken up in junior and senior humanities classes. But without time for reflection, little progress in this soul-training could happen.

Unlike many modern schools, including some that espouse Classical training, Gregory the Great Academy does not offer a plethora of courses. Each student in each grade takes the same classes with all his classmates and is thus liberated from the necessity of choosing a track at an early age. We leave the college courses, such as calculus and chemistry, to college, choosing instead to give high school boys time for their minds to expand and flower, time for them to grow and learn how to make big decisions (such as a life’s course). But most of all, we give the boys time to hike in our fields, time to build a campsite down by our creek, time to play board games and ping pong on cold, rainy days, time to build friendships that last a lifetime.

Over and over we hear that true friendship is built at the Academy, and that it is time and the freedom from technology that made it possible. In these days of shallow online influencers replacing friendship, this gift of time might be the very best gift we can provide young men.

Experiential Learning

Posted on October 19, 2020October 19, 2020 by admin

Learning the Trees

One of the characteristics of the educational method at Gregory the Great Academy is that learning is experiential. At first glance, one might think that that only means we teach our boys to learn by doing, or that we ask them to reenact historical or literary events to get a feel for the context of the times. Although our boys do engage in cardboard boat races in very loose emulation of the Battle of Lepanto, and they quaff root beer, shoot arrows, cook over a fire, and drub each other in quarter-staff battles during Robin Hood Days, this is not what we mean by experiential. These are delightful activities with no aim other than the fun of the thing.

Experiential learning is the development of a habit of reflection as a student learns by doing. “Habit of reflection” is the operative term. The value of doing is enhanced and fostered when a boy wonders, when he asks questions. Reflection causes a student to be active in his own learning and to desire it because he wants his own questions answered.

Aristotle says that we learn by doing the things we have to learn, even before we can do them. In other words, with the guidance of a master we perform a task before we know about it, then we reflect on what we learned in its performance and we begin to know what still must be learned, and we learn how to make it our own. This works beautifully in subjects such as Rhetoric, but the habit of reflection while doing can be employed in any subject. As opposed to purely academic or didactic learning, a great deal of what boys learn experientially is up to them.

For example, in Natural History the boys read about tree identification, providing them a little knowledge, a little academic learning. Now they must go out to the fields and woods and identify the trees they have been learning. This requires them to reflect about what they learned in a book, to question what they still do not know when they come upon a real tree which may not exactly fit the pattern, and to inquire more deeply into how to find out what it is. They discover the answer by keenly observing, by reading, and by consulting with each other and with their teacher. There is happiness, often joy, in this way of learning, and we never forget that the end of any learning, of any doing, is happiness both here and in eternity.

Reason or Imagination?

Posted on October 5, 2020 by admin

The vision of education that informs Gregory the Great Academy is both familiar and strange. Although this education is traditional, it sometimes disappoints the expectations by which traditional, classical education is judged in our day. At Gregory the Great Academy we seek to recover the eternal meaning behind educational methods so as to bring students to love and embrace whatever is good, true, and beautiful.

For example, much of the movement to restore classical education is concerned with the recovery and perfection of reason, a worthy goal on the face of it. In the presence of an epidemic of sloppy and addled thinking, teachers apply the remedy of logic. We, too, teach logic and the love of reason but we believe that it is not enough, for left to itself or overemphasized, logic produces more disease. Man does not live by reason alone, not even reason perfected by logic. However, borne aloft by music and poetry, reason learns new steps that introduce it to a dance in which it moves beyond itself, and becomes a fit partner for the Divine Word.

We do not ask our students to choose between the Muses and Reason, but guide them to keep them in harmony, to express reasonable ideas imaginatively, poetically, beautifully. The joy of studying reason, poetry, and music leads us to the contemplation and cultivation of the things of this world which God has made, and all this culminates in the Liturgy. We believe that when boys are living with truth and beauty, they desire to stay close to their Source. This is the end for which we labor.