Headmaster Musings • Nov 21, 2025

My last musings were so long and academic I thought I’d give the internet a week off before continuing. Last time I examined the shortcomings of the predominant academic fads: Deconstructionism, New Historicism, topical theories, and what is usually called “rhetoric”. None of these approaches, of course, are what we seek to embrace at Chesterton Academy of the Incarnation.

The Chesterton approach is “integrated” in a way that can sometimes resemble New Historicism but is actually very different. Classes are carefully timed so that we are, for instance, reading Renaissance literature, while we are also studying Renaissance history and art, and the Renaissance advancements in science, philosophy, and theology. Unlike in New Historicism, we are not aiming merely to see how the products of the era resemble our inevitably shallow understanding of “what they thought back then.” If we are looking for how the people of past eras were completely different from ourselves, almost by definition, we will only end up comprehending some version of our own preconceptions regarding our superiority or inferiority. But in Chesterton we seek first for the wisdom that does not change from one era to another, the truth that is not subjective or limited. Interestingly, but logically, this is easier than looking for the truly unknown and much more likely to be useful.

This last point, it cannot be emphasized too much, is truly and deeply Catholic. We are the direct creation of the God who created our ancient ancestors, so it would be a very strange thing if they were really so very unlike us, after all. G. K. Chesterton points out in The Everlasting Man that even the very earliest signs we find of the human presence on this planet are fundamentally like ourselves: what we find is art (cave paintings), innovation (tools), and religion (ritual burial practices). There are, of course, differences between human beings of different eras, but what we discover when we delve into them is that almost all that variety ultimately stems from aspects of the same unchanging human nature, the same human yearnings, and the same equally unchanging stain of our fallen condition. Hector of Troy, more than 3,000 years ago, is described as leaving behind the woman and child he loves to protect and preserve them and make possible an island of gentle and civilized domestic life where they may dwell and to which he may return at the end of his labor. How many men today walk out the front door for exactly the same reason? Similarly, the Orestaia, written in Greece about 2500 years ago, addresses the same problem of repentance seeming to be too little to satisfy justice that Christianity finally answers in the revelation of the sacrifice of Our Lord. Indeed, this is the entire idea of there being “great books.” The Great Books are defined precisely by their ability to speak with equal insight and applicability to very different people living in very different ages of the world. This is why we can’t identify them until many years have passed! The Great Books are only able to do this because they speak to precisely those truths that never change.

So, we read the Great Books and we read them seeking particularly the truths that do not change. I’ll continue, and hopefully finish, this musing next week. Let me just conclude by saying, as we approach Giving Day, that all these other approaches, as nihilistic, despairing, and pointless as they may be, are so dominant today in large part because they are so well-funded. Those who wish us to abandon tradition (to remove our knowledge of standards they would have to live up top), to diminish our understanding of human dignity (to make us into useful slaves), and to destroy our love of family and faith in God (to remove competing authorities and duties) are very willing to invest in their desired future.

The universities have more money from these sources than they know what to do with, and it is no accident that parents are receiving back from them young people radicalized, confused, propagandized, and stripped of their familial grounding in tradition and faith. Weak, not strong; perfect subjects of a despotical regime. And high schools are not immune; indeed, they are even more perniciously targeted.

How many high schools brag of being “one-to-one” institutions, for instance? As tiny as our school is, I receive two or three Faustian offers to provide “free” computers to all our students every week, if we are just willing to sign a contract and entrust these young souls (and all their data) to these apparent benefactors, giving up our humane and personal form of education along the way. How many educators, knowing no better, would see this as a great opportunity to “progress” and get “something for nothing.” A close look at these devices educators are constantly offered, however, would shock most parents to the core. Their designs, and the contracts that quietly accompany them, are focused on making it impossible to safeguard the data and exposure of anyone who uses them. They have a singular purpose: to make money for the companies that “donate them” by hooking vulnerable young minds into the nihilistic slavery that they are selling. If young students fail to become discerning and rational actors because the proper education of free people (“liberal arts education”) is taken away from them while they stare at the screens, so much the better, these powers believe. The well-educated and free are much less useful slaves to their masters.

Please consider striking a blow against these cold calculations and this jaded diminishment of the God-given scope of these young souls by making a donation to Chesterton Academy of the Incarnation or talking to someone else who might. Even the smallest donation helps our numbers which, in turn, help us to prove we have local support and thus win bigger donations and grants. Let us, together, form a generation of young people who will demand something better, who will be truly free, and who will therefore have the right and power to give themselves wholeheartedly to their families, their nations, the Church, and above all their God.