Overall Information

With every building and every work of art, there is a sense in which the finished product or the completed work comes first. The builder or the artist starts with a blueprint, a plan, or a picture of the finished work in mind. Sometimes the builder modifies the plan in the course of the work, but he cannot modify it entirely without creating something entirely different or destroying the work altogether. By keeping this picture firmly in view, the builder can ensure that each step in construction occurs for the sake of the next, and he can see how all the steps combine to build up the whole. If this blueprint does not guide his work, then the end result of his labors is not a building, but a heap of stones. Education is like this. Without a clear sense of what education is and the end it serves, we may expend a great deal of effort ‘piling up stones’ instead of truly educating. This outline is like a blueprint. It begins with the end product: the sort of person we hope would emerge after nine years at St. Jerome’s. The actual content of the various subjects within the curriculum are like the foundation stones of the educated person. The skills, aptitudes, and habits we hope to cultivate through pedagogy and through the culture of the school are like the tools of learning. And of course the teachers are the builders who bring their art and experience to bear on the construction of the building. We proceed from the vision, first through the core subjects that would comprise the St. Jerome’s curriculum, and then with increasing detail through the specific stages in the teaching of each subject to show how each stage builds upon the next and these combine with the labors of St. Jerome’s teachers to contribute to the building up of the whole.

St. Jerome School educates children in the truest and fullest sense by giving them the necessary tools of learning and by fostering wonder and love for all that is genuinely true, good, and beautiful. We emphasize classical learning because we want our students to read well, speak well, and think well and ultimately because truth and beauty are good in themselves and desirable for their own sake. We seek to incorporate our students into the wisdom of two thousand years of Catholic thought, history, culture, and arts so that they might understand themselves and their world in the light of the truth and acquire the character to live happy and integrated lives in the service of God and others. Education in this deep and comprehensive sense extends beyond the classroom and is more than just the acquisition of skills. It encompasses the whole of one’s life. For this reason, St. Jerome’s seeks to involve families ever more deeply in the life of the school and in the education of their children. 

True education has always rested on two presuppositions. The first is that truth is desirable for its own sake. It is good not for what it does, but for what it is. The second is that knowledge consists not in bending the truth to ourselves, but in conforming ourselves to truth. We can only conform ourselves to truth by freely embracing and loving it, and we can only love truth if we are enticed by its beauty. Love of beauty has therefore always been integral to the discovery of truth and true education has always sought to form the heart and mind, reason and will, desire and knowledge. In short, education forms the whole person in light of truth, beauty, and goodness.

The Vision Statement seeks to root a comprehensive understanding of education in a compelling and beautiful vision of reality worthy of students’ love. This vision is intended to govern every facet of the school’s life. Its aim is twofold: first, to communicate a certain body of knowledge; and second, to cultivate a certain kind of person, to develop as far as possible what is uniquely human in him, and so to equip him with the skills, habits, and aptitudes necessary to embrace truth and to become the person he was truly created to be. Immediately it becomes clear that no aspect of a school’s life is truly ‘extra-curricular’ or falls outside of its core mission of education, because every aspect of its life—from the way the school prays, to the dress code of students and staff, the arrangement of furniture in the classroom, the paint and posters on the wall, the activities during recess, the way technology is used, and the songs the children sing—reflects the school’s judgments and priorities about the meaning of its educational mission. Everything a school does teaches something. Everything a school does is education of some sort. The important thing is to be sure that it is good and coherent education and that policies, procedures, pedagogical methods, and the culture of the school are not at cross purposes with the vision. 

Curriculum, pedagogical methods, and all the details of the school’s life should therefore be constantly assessed both in light of the conviction that knowledge and love of truth, beauty, and goodness are ends in themselves and in light of the twofold goal of the Vision Statement. Every activity, program, policy, method, or proposal should be tested by the following criteria, which follow from this vision, though are not all equally applicable to each of these facets of the school’s life. 

As the Vision states, the goal of education is the student himself, to form his mind and his character in such a way that he can live his whole life, so far as possible, in a way that is consistent with the truth about himself as a human being created in the image and likeness of God. We often say that we aim to achieve this through an integrated curriculum. But what does this mean? And how is the curriculum integrated? 

Just as there were two complementary dimensions to our vision of education—conveying a definite body of knowledge and forming certain aptitudes, qualities of character, and habits of mind in the student—so too is the curriculum integrated in a similar, twofold way. 

The first is through the content of a historically based curriculum, rooted in an understanding of the human person as a creature, created in the image and likeness of God. From this starting point, the curriculum presents history as a coherent story propelled by the human desire for God and God’s coming to meet, inflame and satisfy that desire in Christ. This is what the Vision Statement means by “incorporating our students into the wisdom of two thousand years of Catholic thought, history, culture, and arts.” This means placing special emphasis on the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and other ancient Near East cultures that make up the Western tradition. This understanding of the person as a creature provides a basis for exploring and appreciating these and other pre-Christian cultures in their own right, for seeking to understand them as they understood themselves. 

But rooting history in the understanding of the human person as a creature with a natural desire for God also orients those cultures toward the coming of Christ, after which they are taken up, transformed, into a new Christian culture in which the deepest of human longings and the highest of human aspirations are met by a gift from God which surpasses all these. Other subjects such as literature, art, and music and even math and nature studies complement this understanding and deepen it. For instance, a class studying Greek culture in the Grammar stage might read and discuss stories from Greek mythology to think along with the Greeks ‘from the inside’. A class studying the Middle Ages in the Logic stage might learn Gregorian chant in music, or consider the symbolism of Gothic architecture in art or the symbolism of shapes in medieval stained glass in conjunction with their introduction to geometry. 

The students will twice cycle through the history of the world. In grades K-5, they will devote one year of study to Egypt and the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, and America respectively. In grades 6-8, they will recapitulate this history by studying the ancient civilizations, then the Middle Ages, and ending with the Modern Age and America. By completing these two cycles, students will reinforce what they have previously learned as well as penetrate the meaning of history more deeply. 

The second dimension integrates the curriculum in the student himself, by cultivating in the student aptitudes, habits, and qualities that shape his approach to all subjects, and bind them together into a unity in what the Vision Statement calls “wonder and love for all that is genuinely true, good, and beautiful.” For instance, the curriculum emphasizes observation and rendering in 10 subjects as varied as art, music, and nature studies. The purpose of this emphasis is also to cultivate within the students habits and powers of looking, seeing, and noticing, the development of which makes us most human and most alive. These, in turn, imply a capacity for concentration, whole-hearted attention, silence, and stillness of both body and soul. The study of music seeks to cultivate the same power of attention and understanding with the sense of hearing as observation does with the sense of sight. In this way, the qualities and habits needed to read beyond the surface level of a story, to notice mathematical patterns in nature, to distinguish one bird from another, to hear parts of a harmony in music, or to recognize how shadows are effected in a painting by lines, geometrical shapes, and gradations of color are not unlike the qualities needed to recognize the presence of God which, like light, always invisibly surrounds us. Approached in this way, the study of nature, music and art is a kind of preparation for contemplative prayer or adoration, and these in turn, prepare the student to study the world and to live in it in a fully human way. 

In these two ways this approach to education forms a unified whole. The core subjects studied at each stage of the curriculum each have peculiar objectives which, taken together, combine for building up the whole. We will look at each of these in very general terms, asking in each case what skills, aptitudes, and knowledge we want our students to come away with at the end of their time at St Jerome’s, in order to see how each subject combines with the others to serve the overall vision and its twofold aim.