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.
