Robert "Tito" Edwards, K.M., O.S.B. Obl. (form.)

Patriarch Ilya II of Georgia passed away this week at age 93. He singlehandedly created a baby boom in his country when he offered to personally baptize every third or higher birth. He was godfather to over 50,000 children.

Old Europe was beautiful because old Europe was Christian.

The first time I heard somebody say the Department of Ed should not exist I thought they were nuts. Then they asked me to list just one academic metric that has improved since its inception in 1980. I couldn’t. Nobody can. SHUT IT DOWN.

A Catholic church, Gesu Parish, located on the Marquette University campus in Milwaukee, was vandalized Wednesday morning. Image: CBS 58

A Berlin school hid the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl by nine Arab boys to avoid “stigmatizing” Muslims. This is Europe now. How did we allow white Europeans to become an abused minority in our own countries?

Catholicism is universal

✝️🇦🇲 Never forget the #Armenian Genocide that martyred 1.5 million blessed #Christians. Rare archival footage of Armenian children on death marches-endless suffering, stolen childhoods, lost generations. May the blessed #Christian martyrs rest in peace. #Armenia #History

19 year old Iranian wrestling champion Saleh Mohammadi was just publicly executed for protesting against the Islamic Regime. So, to all liberal Westerners: Watch and learn. This is what it’s like to ACTUALLY live in a nation with no free speech.

At the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast this morning (where @michaeljknowles absolutely crushed it) I found myself reflecting on what has often been a demoralizing experience working in Catholic education. I started CLT after witnessing firsthand how the College Board was driving mission drift at a Catholic school where I taught. A joyful Dominican sister had introduced two new electives, one in Christian apologetics and another in philosophy. The administration was excited. These were the kinds of courses that always defined a serious Catholic education. But hardly any students signed up. When I asked the students why they didn’t want to take Philosophy or Christian apologetics their response absolutely floored me. I will never forget it. “Mr. Tate, it’s not an AP.” Sometimes they would add, “even if I got an A it would hurt my GPA.” That moment stuck with me. Why were we sidelining the greatest questions ever asked (questions about truth, beauty, and God, simply because they didn’t carry a College Board label?) So we decided to do something about it. We decided to build an alternative to the College Board that drew from the deep well of the Christian and Western intellectual tradition. But here’s the hard part, in the early years, Catholic schools (the very institutions I hoped to serve) were largely uninterested. They preferred to continue chasing College Board accolades, AP distinctions, and National Merit recognition regardless of the impact on the mission and identity of their school. Meanwhile, something unexpected happened. CLT caught fire OUTSIDE the Catholic world. Classical charter schools, homeschool families, and classical Christian schools embraced it. They didn’t hesitate to walk away from the College Board and ACT. They wanted something aligned with their mission, and they found it. By 2023, CLT was in nearly 90% of classical schools… but in less than 5% of Catholic schools. And yet, FINALLY, over the past couple of years, something has shifted. There’s an awakening happening. Some of the strongest Catholic schools and even entire dioceses are beginning to ask the right questions: Why are we parroting the public schools? Why are we outsourcing our curriculum, our assessments, even our vision of education? These aren’t fringe schools. These are some of the top Catholic institutions in the country: Epiphany Catholic School (Coon Rapids, MN) Saint Agnes School (Saint Paul, MN) Frassati Catholic High School (Spring, TX) JSerra Catholic High School (San Juan Capistrano, CA) St. Monica Academy (Montrose, CA) St. Theresa School (Trumbull, CT) Sacred Heart Academy (Grand Rapids, MI) South Hills Catholic Academy (Pittsburgh, PA) Father Gabriel Richard High School (Ann Arbor, MI) Marian High School (Mishawaka, IN) Sparhawk Academy (Millis, MA) Diocese of Lincoln Chesterton, Mother of Divine Grace, Kolbe, and Regina Caeli network Saint Augustine Academy (Ventura, CA) Holy Innocents (Long Beach, CA) Donahue Academy (Ave Maria, FL) Ville de Marie Academy (Scottsdale, AZ) St. Thomas More Academy (South Bend, IN) St. Cecilia Academy (Nashville, TN) Chelsea Academy (Front Royal, VA) And for the first time in a long time, it feels like renewal is not just possible, but already underway. We are amazed by God that we get to be a small part of it!

A Muslim tries to interrupt a Greek Orthodox liturgy in Greece, like they do in the rest of Europe, but it's not working in Greece. If you don't respect us you are going to have a problem. Get out of my country, filthy barbarians.

@flowidealism It may have been after Dewey started with his unneeded changes. You can't make sweeping pronouncements made on anecdotal evidence at best. Today there is a boom in Classical schools that makes the high school experience rich and worthwhile.

Most of high school is a waste of time for most students. High level reading and writing skills are valuable; I don’t believe most students learn such skills at school. Fluency in middle school math and subsequently finance is valuable; most students don’t learn much in that is valuable in high school; sales, marketing, and entrepreneurial skills are incredibly valuable, very few students learn much of value along these lines in high school. STEM students should be getting well into college math by high school. That is maybe 1/3 of students at most. Students should be developing adult level professional skills in their chosen domains in high school. Instead they are dragged through boring and meaningless classes. One size fits all compulsory public high school has been a disaster.

There's an entire literature on how many of history's great creators and entrepreneurs hated school and dropped out as soon as they possibly could. The pattern repeats constantly. Creative genius plus traditional schooling equals misery and early exit. The system is completely misaligned with creative and entrepreneurial personalities. The qualities that make someone innovative, the restlessness and curiosity and refusal to accept arbitrary authority, those exact qualities make school unbearable. We're filtering out the people we need most.

@flowidealism Changing the curriculum to appease the miniscule amount of geniuses who dropped out eventually leads to Woke.

@TitoEdwards The lists of famous entrepreneurs and creators who left school early and/or hated school is long. What on earth does this have to do with woke?

Surprisingly, the first to pass a law against wife beating were the much-maligned Puritans. The Puritan clergy started by preaching against wife beating. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather taught that for “a man to Beat his Wife was as bad as any Sacriledge.” He warned husbands not to “vex and despise their wives, whom they are commanded to love.” Another Puritan minister wrote that the wife-beating husband “shames his profession of Christianity, he breaks the Divine law, he dishonors God and himself, too.” Then, in 1641 the Massachusetts Bay colony enacted the first law anywhere in the world (that historians know of) against wife beating: “Every married woman shall be free from bodily correction or stripes by her husband.” The law was soon amended to include wives beating their husbands, as well as “unnatural severity” against children and servants. One Massachusetts man was even brought to court and fined when neighbors complained that he told his wife she was “but his Servant.” (from The Toxic War on Masculinity)

Parolin ‘resolves problems’ in China by telling President Xi: appoint your own Communist goons as Catholic bishops and we’ll rubber-stamp them.

Old books. Hard questions. Raising children who can think. Classical education is not about going backward. It is about giving children tools that actually work. The great books. “Dead” languages. Big ideas. It sounds elite until you try it.

Notre Dame announces that families with incomes under $150,000 will pay zero tuition: go.nd.edu/54c52a

#Arkansas #CLTExam #Education #CollegeEntrance #Catholic #CatholicX

It’s an incredible dynamic, as American students get dumber by every other metric they are doing better than ever on College Board’s AP! I am in communication with administrators from the most selective universities in America and they universally think AP is a joke.