This article is the second in a five-part series on Donahue Academy’s identity. (Part II)
Last week, we briefly explored Donahue Academy’s Catholic identity and its emphasis on faith and character formation. This week, we will explore its classical education model. To do so, we refer once again to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which teaches that: “Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of ‘converging and convincing arguments,’ which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These ‘ways’ of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.” (CCC 31) So, on the one hand, “the world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe…” (CCC 32) And, on the other hand, “the human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the ‘seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material,’ can have its origin only in God.” (CCC 33)
In this way, education strives toward intellectual formation. “‘Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.’ Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God’s revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created ‘in the image of God.’” (CCC 36) Thus, Donahue Academy employs the classical model of education, which seeks to form students in and through curricula and culture that introduce them to: (1) an integrated and ordered reflection on transcendental realities reflecting truth, beauty, and goodness; (2) a sense of wonder at the cause of things and, thus, the First Cause of knowable and unknowable realities; (3) essential truths, especially those reflecting the dignity of the human person. To achieve this goal, the classical curriculum focuses on the acquisition of knowledge through reading original texts and classics, and it presents various academic disciplines in a sequence that corresponds to a pupil’s maturing ability to think abstractly and is developmentally appropriate.
The classical approach to education assists students in becoming self-motivated and self-correcting learners as they acquire the tools of learning in the “grammar, logic and rhetoric stages” of growth, or the Trivium. The Grammar Stage (Grades K-5) focuses on presenting information, the broad acquisition of facts, and laying the foundation of knowledge. The Logic Stage (Grades 6-8) focuses on organizing information gathered in the Grammar Stage, making connections, and learning to evaluate evidence. The Rhetoric Stage (Grades 9-12) focuses on synthesizing and learning to express increasingly complex insights with eloquence and precision. Over the course of their 13-year career at Donahue Academy, young people are formed in the light of truth so that they may become not only lifelong learners but also salt and light in the world.
