The death of the extreme right’s savior last September has the wingnuts busy trying to create another one. However they’re finding out that it’s not as easy as it looks to replicate a stupid, bigoted loser with a veneer of learned reasonableness, and by the time kids graduate from college, it’s too late. And evidently the clubs they’ve opened in high schools aren’t the assembly lines they’d hoped they be, so now the solution is to create their own savior in a lab. Enter the St. Jerome Institute.

Now Catholic high schools are pretty common, but this one is different. I’ll let one of the cheerleaders for the school explain it:

First, every class is taught with the seminar method. There are no passive lectures. Teachers lead discussions with 15-20 students sitting and facing one another. While leading a great seminar is difficult for any teacher, it quickly becomes clear that it is worth the investment, given how much more engaging and beneficial the experience is for students. Well-run seminars require participation, necessitating that students become actively engaged as they learn to listen, think, and speak well.

[deletia]

Third, the curriculum embraces the liberal arts and the rich Catholic intellectual tradition. Students grapple with Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and the great literary works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. They gain an in-depth knowledge of Western civilization from Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem through England and the founding of our own country.

Sounds about white.

And then there’s this from the school’s website:

It was a few years later that I finally saw a well-run Socratic seminar at a local charter school. The students were reading the Nicomachean Ethics and doing exactly what I always dreamed my students would do: carefully analyzing the text, assessing the truth of the claims, arguing points fervently, listening to others with humility, and recognizing the relevance of the claims on their own lives. There was a drama and a purpose to the class that I had never seen before. I became convinced then and there that the best method for teaching contemporary high school students is a well-structured seminar.

I am the product of Catholic schools—first of the grammar school attached to my childhood parish, and then of 1 of the 2 local college prep high schools. This high school looks nothing like mine.

Now the CLT exam is the SAT for the right wing group. Here’s what you need to know in a nutshell–which schools accept it in lieu of the SAT (not without its own drawbacks, to be sure):  https://www.cltexam.com/colleges/

So if they’re touting this school there’s got to be a conservative or extremist political angle to it, and that shows up in its board of directors:  a number of graduates of the extremely conservative Pontifical John Paul II Institute, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It’s a pretty far right group. It becomes clear that SJI isn’t about education, but instead about indoctrination. I have always been skeptical of these “classical” schools, because they are always about parochialism in the worst sense of the word. Students don’t live in a bubble, and education cannot thrive in a bubble.

So that’s why SJI students learn to converse fluently in…Latin, a dead language. Imagine a language, unlike English, where words are irretrievably gendered and its vocabulary is fixed. Students get to write and perform plays in Latin. That pretty much limits what they can say, huh?

The school has its roots in a conservative parish in Hyattsville, MD with a Catholic grammar school, but this iteration is heavily MAGA (with the requisite stock of adult Catholic converts (but that’s a discussion for another time)).

For me the real tell is the way every class is run as a  “seminar”. How are first year students going to conduct themselves in a seminar on the Song of Roland? And another tell is that the students are going to study Pope…Benedict. And the SAT scores on Niche are not great considering how much the school touts its high level of academics.

This isn’t your traditional college prep Catholic high school. This is an incubation chamber to find the Catholic version of the wingnut “debate me” guy. Fake seminars in a setting otherwise devoid of avenues to sharpen critical thinking skills are just routes to straight up  propaganda. The glibbest take will win, and no one in the room will have the ability to point out where the logic is thin or where it disappears entirely.

That’s exactly what the people pushing to destroy this country want.

I’ll leave you with this: