Catholic Education: Now More Than Ever

You don’t have to be Catholic to know that American culture is in bad shape. Most modern art is ugly. Most popular entertainment is soulless and brainless. And thanks to Big Tech, it’s addictive, too.

Students’ attention spans are so screen-scrambled that they can’t read books. Our public schools seem best understood as a trillion-dollar conspiracy to make our children fragile, passive, ignorant, and depressed. (Is it any wonder young Americans are suffering a mental health crisis while retreating from dating, marriage, and children?)

All this brokenness is overseen by a predatory corporate elite trying to monetize it and a derelict political elite trying to deflect blame for it. And Artificial Intelligence is about to make each of the above pathologies worse. Every day, every lie modernity tells about the human person becomes harder to detect and refute.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, we already have a solution: Catholic education. In particular, the authentically Catholic education of America’s Newman Guide Recommended schools and colleges.

What America needs

The institutions recommended by The Cardinal Newman Society understand that education is formation. Their mission is not just sharpening minds but enlarging hearts, strengthening souls, and igniting moral imaginations. The Cardinal Newman Society is half right when they say, “No secular education is a complete education.” It’s nearer the mark to say that no secular education is even possible.

The fact is, all education is values education. The only question is: which values? Decades of experience have taught us that secular institutions are neither neutral nor relativistic on this score. They are intolerant and doctrinaire.

At public, private, and even many Catholic universities today, students are steeped in the values of moralistic therapeutic deism, with some intersectional cultural Marxism mixed in. At these secular colleges, students learn to despise America, the West, free enterprise, the Constitution, human nature, science, and Church teaching. And with ubiquitous grade inflation and AI-enabled cheating today, that is all many students really learn.

The case for secular education is that it gives students practical skills to succeed in the real world, without wasting their time on the supposedly impractical arts, letters, and humanities.

But to be freed from the liberal arts is to be… unfree.

After all, those so-called hard skills — critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving — are all rooted in the philosophy, theology, and literature “practical” education eschews.

Today, secular education is failing even on its own terms. Procedural, mechanical, technical proficiencies are precisely the ones that AI is already automating. The most marketable “skills” in the coming era are going to be things like moral judgment, interpersonal empathy, and cultural literacy.

This is precisely the knowledge taught by classical, liberal, Catholic education. Newman Guide schools and colleges all maintain traditional core curricula that expose all their students, regardless of major, to the best that man has thought and said. Their authentic Catholic education teaches students to discern the good, the beautiful, and the true from the merely efficient. They show students how to make a logical argument — and how to detect an illogical one. They know that faith and reason strengthen each other, as steel sharpens steel.

By grounding curricula in the humanities, Newman Guide schools and colleges give their digital-age students a better sense of what it means to be human. The Newman Guide college I used to lead, Wyoming Catholic College, puts this insight at the center of its core curriculum, which famously features a technology-free outdoor leadership and wilderness program. And the classical school I founded, John Paul the Great Catholic Academy in Lafayette, La., forms younger boys and girls in faith and reason.

The U.S. economy will soon have all the systemic, analytical power it needs to thrive at the touch of a button. What will be harder to find is men and women who know how to use it while applying a deep understanding of sin and virtue and humility and happiness.

A new generation of leaders

Nowhere is this need more obvious than in our national politics. So many of the challenges America faces today are the result of leadership failures — specifically, our self-styled practical elites’ failure to grapple with human nature.

They judge policy by their own good intentions rather than the toxic incentives they write into the law. To technocratic elites, society is a machine and governance just a matter of tightening the right screws and oiling the right hinges. They don’t understand why treating people like things isn’t working.

Newman Guide colleges are some of the only schools I know of where students learn not only how to avoid such mistakes, but how to fix them. Their alumni are already proving it.

Brian Burch (University of Dallas ’97) created CatholicVote while still in his 20s and spent two decades building it into the largest network of authentically Catholic public advocacy in the country. Now serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Burch will before long return to the United States one of the most politically experienced and influential Catholics of his generation, with a future even brighter than his successes to date.

Terry Schilling (Franciscan University ’09)  was the first conservative activist to grasp the threat of transgenderism when it was still a gathering storm on the horizon. His organization, the American Principles Project, saw what the Left had planned and how to fight back. As early as 2015, Schilling collected data, informed and mobilized voters, and helped Americans see how hostile the other side was becoming to family, children, and biological truth.

Burch and Schilling are part of a new generation of leaders more interested in family and community flourishing than tax rates. Theirs is a conservatism of solidarity, subsidiarity, and human dignity. They — and many other young Newman Guide alumni in Washington and across the country — are working to put the values at the center of their education into the center of our national life.

They know — they learned — that to build a healthier culture, we need a more human politics. And it all starts with a faithful Catholic education.