From Dr. Thurow:
Believe their websites and you’ll be convinced that almost every school in existence will “teach students how to think”, “develop critical thinking”, “achieve academic excellence”, “accomplish a rigorous curriculum”, “experience diversity”, “achieve full potential”, “ideals”, “achieve excellence”, “become a life-long-learner” etc. They say the same things because they hire from the same pool of advertising professionals coming from the same set of colleges. But ask them what any of these buzz words mean or, even more telling, precisely how they achieve them and it is another matter. The dirty secret is that these sorts of marketing terms are designed precisely to mean nothing in particular (making no verifiable promises) while still giving the reader a good feeling. They are there to assure you that the education is “good” (whatever that means) so you only really pay attention to the superficialities that dominate the rest of their webpages, mostly in gigantic colorful pictures.
Let’s take one example: the humanities curriculum. If a school does not tell you what books your child will read there, why not? There seem to be three possibilities: they don’t think you care, they don’t want you to know, or they don’t think it matters. Well, I’m afraid to say there is actually one more possibility that is growing more common: they don’t read books! All of these possibilities trouble me, personally. There are other aspects of education, of course, but the books one reads are an absolutely core component of intellectual and moral formation; they are the teachers and companions of the learner, the unseen interlocutors in every debate. They are also, as it turns out, a very clear indicator of what a school is attempting to achieve. If a school is giving their students only modern popular fiction, for instance, they are obviously trying to form students who conform to modern popular culture. If they are reading very few books and mostly excerpts or workbooks, they are trying to produce higher standardized test scores without the hard work of actually forming the students’ minds. If they read only non-Catholic writers they are forming non-Catholics. If they read books with short sentences and simply vocabulary they are trying to create good grades, not good students. And, of course, if they are reading only texts of one ideological leaning they are attempting to form ideologues and “right-thinkers”. Even if the goal is merely to produce the skill of reading (literacy), surely the reader will be influenced by what he or she reads in the process! The buzz words are there because market research indicates that customers like them, but they do not provide any of the essential data necessary for parents, as primary educators, to make an informed decision concerning their children’s education. All these terms work this way: “critical thinking”, for instance, could mean “logical” or “sceptical” or “secular” or “informed by contemporary academic theories” of “in the style of professional critics” or “with an aim to criticize”, and the list goes on!
Chesterton Academy of the Incarnation’s approach is the exact opposite. Our very name tells everyone who is interested what we are about. We declare it proudly. Read G. K. Chesterton and you will see our principles and inspiration. And our website tells you what books we read. Try clicking on “curriculum” on the website of your garden variety high school and you will see what I mean. They’ll give you a list of subject areas and numbers of credits and, if you are very lucky, a list of classes like “Modern British Literature”. But, of course, this tells you virtually nothing other than that they teach roughly the same subjects as every other school and that the books they read in “Modern British Literature” will have been written in English some time in the last four hundred years! Are they reading Harry Potter, The Power and the Glory, the poetry of William Wordsworth, or a collection of popular board-books about a lost goose? If they do not tell you, why not?
March 6, 2026