The Montfort Academy

---

 

I hold it as a singular privilege to be headmaster of The Montfort Academy. After a quarter century in the education field, I believe that the philosophy professed and the virtues inculcated at Montfort are more critical than ever for the formation of our young people.

Why should this be so?

G.K. Chesterton observed that the problem with modern education is that it begins with the modern world; therefore it starts at the wrong end:

[Schools have] the responsibility for affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side.

In the classical design at Montfort, the masters of the ages take pride of place – “the best that has been thought and said,” in the words of Matthew Arnold. An education in the great literary, artistic, scientific, and spiritual achievements of Western Civilization forms the core of our curriculum - the great ideas and the great books that offer the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The Montfort method follows the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The student, therefore, is expected not simply to be a receptacle of new ideas and information, useful as that may be, but to think analytically, communicate those thoughts, and make new and specific applications with them. At the same time, it is a teacher directed education. We affirm this not in the sense of students being merely passive, but with the understanding that they can only give what they already possess. If, like a flower, they are uprooted before they mature, they risk being placed in new soil that is presently too rich. However, as the students progress in their education, their role must increase – to use a biblical allusion – while the role of the teacher decreases.

Yet, the essence of Montfort is even more than that. Prior in dignity, if subsequent in historical chronology, is the Catholic Faith, without which a truly classical education is missing its prime component. Blessed John Henry Newman affirmed that “Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education.” A Montfort education, therefore, places grace before nature and integrates the Faith across the curriculum such that it permeates all areas of the school’s life. Far from making each of the secular subjects a branch of theology, seen in the light of the Faith, each subject is elevated to its proper state. For the same God who redeemed us, instructed us in the good news, and gave us the Mass and the sacraments for our sanctification, also ordained the order in our number system, created the earth and sky to which we apply the scientific method, and infused an immortal soul into the geniuses of music, literature, art, and philosophy.

One hears a lot these days about educating the “whole child,” but this can only be done in its fullest sense by incorporating the supernatural with the natural, the divine with the human, the cerebral with the active; in short, a thoroughly classical, Catholic education. This is the education we offer at Montfort, and it is an exciting task with which to be involved. I started out by saying what a privilege it is to be at The Montfort Academy, and I can do no better than conclude with the words of St. John Chrysostom: “What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young.”