I am John Toppa, and my favorite author is G.K. Chesterton. He believed the modern education system had already failed, and he was writing that in the 1920s.
His reasoning was simple. Creation is woven together in every part, and truth is singular and knowable. The system we built runs on the opposite premise, fragmentation. We set aside the ancient truths that the fathers of Western civilization had spent centuries synthesizing, and truth itself became something economized and up for grabs. Instead of teaching the principles a person needs to discern what is true, we relegated philosophy to a freshman elective at the city college. As the subjects grew more specialized, the students grew more disjointed. Chesterton's argument was that education cannot claim to survey all of truth while refusing to discuss the one truth that harmonizes the rest, faith in the First Principle, God.
The Chesterton model starts with the building blocks the ancients left us. It shows a student the math of Pythagoras in the octaves on a sheet of music, and the line between the physics of Newton and the metaphysics of Aristotle. Most of all, it forms the whole person through the uncompromised teaching of the Catholic Church, a moral theology and a grip on ethics that does not expire and applies to any circumstance any age can produce. Faith and reason are never at odds in this model. They are inseparable facets of a fully formed adult.
The point of education in the formative years is not to master an isolated subject for future earnings. It is to build a framework a person can function inside as society keeps changing around them. A well rounded and properly formed person brings a sense of wonder to the world, seeks out the true, the good, and the beautiful, and does not compromise on any of the three.
A Chesterton Academy stands on three pillars, intellect, character, and spirituality, and not one of them is ever sacrificed for the other two. The students study and perform the fine arts, speak in Latin, take part in daily worship, and build a sense of community that outlasts graduation. A Chesterton student looks an adult in the eye and greets them assertively and respectfully, holds a real conversation, and gives free time to principled causes like the right to life.
I am drawn to this because it is a real fix for a broken world. That is why I am helping bring one to Brevard County.
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