Why Catholics Can't Read

A Catholic school should be considered primarily as an apostolate of the parish to which it is attached. By “Catholic school,” I am primarily referring to diocesan Catholic schools, like the high school where I teach, not tony private schools “in the Jesuit tradition.” It should not view itself as a values-based, value-added alternative to the local public schools; nor as a carefully balanced collection of disparate stakeholder interests; nor as what Ronald Knox once called a “mere alumnate”—a sort of sports association for legacy families. Rather, the goal of a Catholic school should be to mold the children of the parish in the faith into fully formed Catholic men and women. The ultimate test of whether a Catholic school is fulfilling its mission is whether it produces people who love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love their neighbor as themselves. That should also be the criterion for each step of the educational process, and every facet of schooling: is this helping students to love God, or is it hindering them?

Some good tests for whether or not a school is fulfilling its mission of formation are questions like: Do students actively participate in the Mass? Do they pray before and after Mass? Do they pray along with the staff when the school prays the Rosary, or do they silently refuse to participate? Do non-Catholic students and families ever convert to the Faith? Do students continue to practice the Faith after they graduate? Does the school produce vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life? Is the students’ attitude toward learning characterized by curiosity and wonder? Do students have their own intellectual pursuits? Do students read books for fun? If you talked to a student, would she be likely to have a favorite book, or one that has formed her way of thinking? Do students have conversations with teachers about books and the big questions of life? For all of the above questions, the followup question must be asked: if not, then why not?

In answering some of these questions, Catholic schools should resist the temptation to point to a “token seminarian” or a “token convert.” Instead, let’s consider those vocations that have been formed and those conversions that have been fostered, and ask, were they shaped by the atmosphere of the school and the culture of their classmates, or were they going against it? It would be worthwhile to ask these alumni what aspects of the school supplemented the call of God’s grace, and what aspects were more like obstacles to that call, which had to be overcome for God’s grace to do its work.

Unfortunately, these aren’t the questions Catholics always ask about our schools. In my experience, diocesan Catholic schools single-mindedly focus on meeting the benchmarks for renewed accreditation, perhaps even more than they attend to increasing enrollment, though that concern is a close second. In focusing on these concerns, schools ignore Our Lord’s great principle: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” If we were to honestly attend to the question of whether we are faithfully forming Christian souls for heaven, the question of accreditation would fall into place on its own. But when we are focused on accreditation, we neither form Christian souls, nor meet the accreditation benchmarks.

Educators in Catholic schools throughout the country are very familiar with the N.S.B.E.C.S. benchmarks adopted by the N.C.E.A. The National Catholic Educational Association’s benchmarks, of which the full title is the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools, are used by most dioceses to grade the effectiveness of a Catholic school, and to determine continued accreditation. They were written and promulgated in 2012 by a committee at Loyola University in Chicago. Although some of the content of these standards is unobjectionable, borrowing language from Church documents on the role of Catholic schools, they ultimately fail to express a fully Catholic view of learning or to require a coherent formation-based curriculum; and the effort to demonstrate compliance with the N.S.B.E.C.S. benchmarks often fosters an attitude of “checking the box,” warping Catholic educators’ understanding of their own role and mission.

One example of the limited value of accreditation benchmarks is in the realm of technology. Standard 12 of the N.S.B.E.C.S. benchmarks, which deals with technology, seems fairly reserved. It says that every school should have a technology plan, consistent with the school’s mission. However, it doesn’t say that each school should have a firm philosophical grounding—based in the Catholic tradition—for each decision to use or not use a particular technology. And so the automatic assumption is that more technology is always better. The goal, in the absence of strong countercultural instincts, is always going to be a one-to-one student-to-device ratio, whether or not this is good for learning, or makes sense from a Catholic perspective. In practice, what this looks like is having elementary students spend whole class periods on Chromebooks, without reflecting on whether that is a good thing.

Not all of the accreditation standards are inherently detrimental to Catholic education, but the attempt to meet them fosters an unhealthy attitude of “checking the box” among staff and administration. There is an old Latin motto—esse quam videri—that comes from what Sallust said about Cato: “he preferred to be, rather than seem, good.” The accreditation process is all about seeming rather than being; the emphasis is on “providing evidence” that we’re doing things well, rather than actually doing things well.

A major problem with the accreditation benchmarks is that they’re from a different era. The National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools were published in 2012. This was before the pandemic stirred up a wave of discontent with the educational status quo, making many parents turn to homeschooling and private Christian schools in search of something better. This was also before the movement of classical Catholic liberal arts education and its renewal of Catholic schools throughout the country. It was also published before the deleterious effects of cellphones on children were made so painfully clear. (In 2012, I was in high school.) We are in the middle of an unprecedented assault on students’ attention spans, reading comprehension, and religious commitments, coming directly from their pocket computers. It is the main problem that faithful Catholic teachers have to deal with today. What do the standards have to say about it? Nothing. Because of this, they are of little practical use in 2024.

When Catholic schools rely on accreditation benchmarks to guide their school improvement plans and their professional development for teachers, they are tethering themselves to an outdated model of what a Catholic school should be. Catholic schools that follow this model—the “prep school” model, which seeks affluent secular markers of success and coats secular educational values and standards with excessive displays of “Catholic identity”—are dying out throughout the country. The future of Catholic education is one that is deliberately countercultural. Otherwise, it has no future. Now, accreditation is not going away. Nevertheless, plans of school improvement should not be dependent upon accreditation benchmarks, but should come from better, more philosophically coherent sources.

When Catholic schools focus on accreditation benchmarks, they ignore important aspects of formation. The most glaring example may be in the realm of curriculum. I don’t think it would be going too far to say that most Catholic schools lack a curriculum. They may have textbooks, and they will probably have a sequence of classes for each subject. Each teacher is almost certainly required to cover the state standards for their grade level and subject in one way or another. However, there is no coherent plan of formation going from kindergarten to twelfth grade—a body of knowledge that students should know and understand by the time they graduate.

One reason for this is a misguided emphasis on skills over content. This is a mistake that is unfortunately encouraged by reliance on the N.S.B.E.C.S. benchmarks, which take for granted the state Common Core standards. The N.S.B.E.C.S. benchmarks themselves disclaim any interest in specific curriculum content: they are “offered as school effectiveness standards rather than curriculum content standards, although they support curriculum development consistent with national standards.” However, this divorce between school effectiveness and curriculum is a mistake. There are many reasons it is misguided to not prescribe specific content to be taught at a Catholic school. The biggest reason is that it betrays an un-Catholic view of learning. A skills-based education is fundamentally oriented towards preparing students for the workforce. The traditional Catholic view of education, however, is fundamentally oriented towards knowledge and understanding, with the ultimate goal of knowing God. In our tradition, education is the process of coming to know the truth, and conforming oneself to it. This happens through encounters with that which is good, true, and beautiful, whether that is learning about the wonders of God’s creation in science class, or experiencing the order and harmony of the universe in mathematics or music, or memorizing a poem that conveys some truth in a beautiful way, or reading about the effects of human wisdom and folly in history class. In the history classroom, for example, we see God’s plan at work in preparing the world for the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. He does this through his revelation of Himself to the Hebrews, surrounded by the pagan nations; through the Greek pursuit of philosophy and their discovery of the divine Logos, along with the spread of their culture throughout the world; through the dominance of the Roman empire and its efficient roads and laws. We then see the rise of the Church and its civilizing influence on medieval Europe. In authentic Catholic education, the unfolding of this story receives a privileged place in history class, because you can’t understand the Bible, you can’t understand the Mass, you can’t understand the stories of the saints without knowing it. (Of course, the more you understand something, the more you are able to love it.) Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome are the capital cities of Catholic education.

The study of literature should not be content-neutral in a Catholic school, either. Great literature is integral to our faith in many ways. The goal for an English class in a Catholic school should not be to perform well on standardized tests. It should not be all about making students read short passages and “find the main idea.” The development of reading comprehension must be ordered to the reading of great literature. Otherwise, why learn to read at all? Without the ennobling influence of great literature and Sacred Scripture, all literacy is good for, to paraphrase a colleague, is to make people more susceptible to advertising and propaganda.

Reading good stories at an early age, especially myths, legends, and fairy tales, builds children’s moral imagination. It provides them with an imaginative framework for understanding the world around them, and a rich resource on the affective level for discerning between good and evil, right and wrong. In reading classic fairy tales, children practice navigating a world filled with perils by stepping into the shoes of an Everyman protagonist, and are thereby given the confidence that no matter what “monsters” they will have to face, the story is going to end happily ever after. In this way, fairy tales are an essentially Christian genre. Crucially, fairy tales are not cloyingly didactic; they teach about the consequences of vice in a way that is extremely subtle, but deeply profound. (For example, the envious queen in the original version of “Snow White” dances to her death in red-hot shoes, which I think reveals something very true about the nature of envy.) Often when Catholic elementary teachers try to teach moral values, they read books along the lines of “Sparky the Dog teaches us how to share.” Of course, children see this as being cheap and fake. Or if they are unusually docile, as students at diocesan schools often seem to be, they nevertheless soon outgrow this sort of didactic literature, and move on to what their parents consider the “real world” of service hours and golf scholarships. But fairy tales, on the other hand, are never outgrown. They can be read with pleasure at age six, or sixteen, or sixty. They deal in archetypes that resonate in all the crises of life.

Another type of literature that is valuable in forming young Catholics is legends of heroes, tales of great figures from history, and stories of saints. In these stories, children find examples of virtue and vice in action. If fairy tales present a kind of moral bunraku stage, then legends present a moral laboratory. In addition to the fairy tale’s world of good and evil, legends have complex characters like Sir Lancelot or King David, who, like most of us, are somewhere in between. We see these characters having to face important moral decisions. Sometimes they make the right decision, but sometimes they fail to do so, and face terrible consequences. Through teaching these stories, we can start to introduce more complex moral situations, and more nuanced shades of character.

Mythology, especially the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, is crucially important to introduce to students at a young age. These myths are the foundations upon which all later Western literature is built; it is impossible to understand most great works of literature without being familiar with this body of knowledge. These myths form the background to modern Western man’s idea of himself. Their tragic view of life is crucial for understanding the pagan world into which the Gospel emerged. For the apostles, the pagan world was not filled with false religions which the Gospel refuted, or with not-nice people whom the Gospel told to be nice. It was filled with demonic powers and principalities (the gods) whom the Gospel defeated. In the older form of the Mass, this fact is commemorated by reading the Gospel facing the pagan North. And of course, recall that St. Peter tells us of Christ preaching to the spirits in Tartarus. It’s impossible to fully understand our own religion without being somewhat familiar with pagan mythology.

For elementary and middle school students, classic children’s books such as Frog and Toad, The Chronicles of Narnia, Charlotte’s Web, Little House on the Prairie, and many others are a crucial part of Christian formation. They show in a concrete way what honor looks like, and friendship, and loyalty. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Pinocchio and Treasure Island show vicious behavior for the ridiculous thing it is (again, in a non-didactic way). These books expand children’s imaginative horizons. No modern book is more dizzyingly multicultural than Rudyard Kipling’s great Kim.

It feels ridiculous to defend the idea of having kids read good books. But such is our lot. In many Catholic schools as well as public schools, students in English classes spend their time reading passages and answering questions on their Chromebooks rather than reading good books together. This is done in the hopes of increasing scores on standardized tests. In theory, students could be reading good literature on their own, and teachers do carve out time for them to read “independent choice books” in class. (Though of course, most children’s and “young adult” books are trash.) But no thought has been put into giving children books that form noble qualities in the soul. Some time ago, a priest I know asked high school students whether any of them had read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Only one student raised his hand. I wonder how many of those students have an imaginative conception of the Faith strong enough to withstand the allurements of the world. I doubt whether this is something that theology class alone can provide.

In high school, students should be reading more complex works of literature, works that explore deeper ideas and questions. Books, poems, and plays that communicate truth in a profound way are necessary for the formation of mature Catholics, even when the author was not a Christian or maybe even opposed to the Faith. Being able to read the greatest works of literature allows students to witness something of extraordinary goodness and beauty; and everything of extraordinary goodness and beauty points to God, the author of goodness and beauty. Everything of extraordinary goodness and beauty makes the Mass make more sense; everything of extraordinary goodness and beauty makes it easier to understand what it’s like to be a saint.

This is why Catholic high schoolers should be reading The Brothers Karamazov, the most profound Christian response to the problem of evil and suffering in the world. Dostoyevsky shows us what it means to be tossed this way and that by the passions and what it means to be a saint. It is why they should be reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with its hero’s great moral crisis, when he says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” and decides not to turn in Jim—in this we see the natural law written on the human heart. It is why they should be reading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which uses ironic humor to make virtue and reason attractive, and vice and folly unattractive, and Huxley’s Brave New World, which depicts a utopian future strangely like the present, in which every source of inconvenience and discomfort has been banished by advanced technology. It is why they should be reading Shakespeare and Paradise Lost, to discover “how awful goodness is,” and maybe learn that older meaning of the word “awful.”

Of course, many high school teachers are more or less on the same page about this. But it’s hard to teach great literature when students have never read any complex texts before arriving in high school, or any great children’s literature, or much of the Bible, or any myths or legends or fairy tales. High-school English sometimes becomes a matter of completing comprehension tasks and doing projects rather than engaging in wide-ranging discussion of literature. These tasks and projects must be regularly graded and updated in the twenty four-seven accessible online gradebook. For teachers who have never been in a seminar-style class before, it may be easy to assume that this is just how it is. Teachers who have experienced what a real English class is like will reply with the words of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Faustus, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

The study of literature should not be content-neutral in a Catholic school. In English as in other subjects, it’s the content that makes it Catholic: the two are inseparable. The Faith cannot be relegated to the theology classroom. Having said that, it’s also a mistake to try to make the subjects “Catholic” in an artificial way, which has nothing to do with a thoroughly Catholic worldview. This is often done in order to meet N.S.B.E.C.S. Standard 7, which requires “integration of the religious, spiritual, moral, and ethical dimensions of learning in all subjects.” Since the Common Core standards are not rooted in a Catholic vision of education, attempts to meet N.S.B.E.C.S. Standard 7 tend to be ridiculous. A high school math teacher I know recently joked that he could meet the standard by coming up with story problems that ask “How many nuns . . . ?” This joke isn’t far from the literal truth. I was told recently about a class at a Catholic school that fulfills this standard by incorporating theological messages into their Fall pumpkin carving. To paraphrase what Hank Hill said about Christian rock music: “You’re not making theology any better, you’re just making pumpkin carving worse.” All of this is unnecessary. Science and math already glorify God, when pursued for the sake of an encounter with truth, rather than S.T.E.M. career prep. You don’t have to make them “Catholic.” And carving pumpkins just for fun also glorifies God. It doesn’t need to be made “Catholic” because it already is.

Now, I know that some may grow impatient with all this woo-woo mystical stuff. For most of the people who run Catholic schools in this country—advisory boards, diocesan offices—the most important thing is to follow what the educational experts with Ph.D.s say. Otherwise, we won’t be competitive with the best schools in the surrounding area. We would fall behind the Joneses. (Never mind the fact that the educational experts with Ph.D.s are always changing their minds and falling for the latest fads.) It is understandable that stakeholders might want curricular decisions to be supported by practical research and evidence. However, much of what I’m saying isn’t just head-in-the-clouds Catholic mysticism or classical education ideology. It’s true from a secular standpoint as well. The education reformer E. D. Hirsch has written about how cultural literacy— knowledge about the world, rather than skills—is what determines student success. In his book The Knowledge Deficit, Hirsch claims that the presence or lack of background knowledge is the main factor that determines a student’s reading comprehension. Today researchers such as Doug Lemov, Christopher Such, and Natalie Wexler provide support for Hirsch’s claim, using findings from the field of cognitive science. They show that reading comprehension is a product of fluency (mastery of decoding or phonics), background knowledge (vocabulary and familiarity with facts and concepts), and experience with different types of texts, rather than supposedly transferable skills such as making inferences or finding the “main idea.” A study from 1987 is often cited in support of the importance of background knowledge. This study, often referred to as the “Baseball Study,” separated junior high students into four groups, based on two factors: whether or not they were considered “good readers,” and whether or not they knew much about baseball. They had all four groups read the same passage about a baseball game. The study found that the main factor that determined a student’s understanding of the passage was how much they knew about baseball. We can infer from this and other studies that the best way a school can improve its students’ reading comprehension is by using a school-wide curriculum that builds knowledge across all subjects.

In addition to the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum, the value of reading whole books rather than short excerpts is also supported by current research. Lemov, the author of the classic manual Teach Like a Champion, has done good work recently in showing how much reading novels can support the acquisition of background knowledge, especially when paired with supplementary non-fiction texts. When reading a novel, students become deeply invested in what happens to the characters, and want to know more about anything that affects those characters’ lives. This makes the non-fiction texts on topics related to the novel more meaningful for students, and helps them retain more of the information from the non-fiction texts than if they had read them without connection to the novel.

Reading whole books fosters a culture of aspirational reading, in a way that reading excerpts on the computer just doesn’t. Reading a classic book can be a sort of rite of passage, especially when you’ve heard about the book from adults and your fellow students (even if you’ve only heard them complain about it, as students since the dawn of time have been wont to do). If students read a difficult book together as a class, and come out on the other side all in one piece and the better for it, then they’re more likely to do it on their own. Not only have they already done it before, but the teacher has modeled for them how to navigate the difficult parts—when to look up a word and when to just rely on context and keep on going, and when to go back and reread. Also, students are more likely to read on their own if the people around them, especially adults, seem to believe that it’s a normal thing to do.

I previously mentioned the concentrated assault on students’ attention spans coming from cell phones and social media. This is yet another reason why it’s important to have students read physical books. Children should practice dedicating their whole attention to something for extended periods of time, whether that is a tree, a painting, a poem, or a chapter in a book. According to Catholic theology, the highest end of human existence is contemplation. It’s what the saints are doing in heaven. How are we supposed to form Christian souls for heaven if we don’t teach our students how to give something their undivided attention? “Attention,” Simone Weil said, “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Catholic education is not about making everything artificially Catholic. It’s about forming students who are capable of prayer.

This is another problem with the online reading programs used by many Catholic schools, even programs such as Amplify, which incorporate the science of reading and advertise themselves as knowledge-based curricula. One of their supposed advantages is their engaging visuals, which imitate the social media that kids are so used to. In these reading programs, just like in social media, there is always something to click on, often a paraphrase of a difficult phrase or sentence. Sometimes these programs imitate computer games in the way that students are incentivized to increase their reading level. The goal is to use the fast paraphrases, gamified format, and individualized instruction to increase students’ confidence in reading. But what happens to that confidence when students try reading a book with only text, without engaging visuals or anything to click on? They will find it a profound challenge. And in fact, that’s what many teachers encounter in the classroom. When we allow independent free reading we see more and more students who are literally unable to pick up a book and start reading it. We must work to heal our students’ digital addictions rather than catering or resigning ourselves to them.

What many students cannot currently do but must learn is to read complex texts on their own: the Declaration of Independence, or a peer-reviewed psychological study, or a Flannery O’Connor story. That is what students will have to do every night in college. And so—aside from the importance of literature for Catholic formation—students have to read complex texts in high school. But before students arrive at high school and are asked to read complex texts, they need to have some experience reading texts that help to prepare them for such a challenge. Doug Lemov calls these pre-complex texts. Students need to be exposed ahead of time to things like archaic language, shifts in time sequence, layered plots, and discipline-specific terminology.

Then there is the question of writing—a fraught question for many reasons, not just because of new A.I. technology. Many Catholic dioceses require high school students to submit a senior thesis on some sort of theological topic. This is a more difficult requirement for both students and teachers than it would have been even just ten years ago. Without early practice reading complex texts, without a culture of reading in our schools, without efforts to build students’ attention spans, and without an emphasis on human formation, we end up with students who are also unable to write. To write even minimally well students need a certain amount of intellectual curiosity. They need to have a certain amount of grounding in the Church’s philosophical tradition. They need the capacity to do a certain amount of difficult reading on their own, and the capacity to read for thorough understanding, rather than mindlessly pulling quotes to copy and paste. They need to have a certain amount of experience with reading non-fiction; they must know what various kinds of writing in different genres are supposed to sound like. They must have a certain amount of interest in a given question, enough that they’ll be impelled to discuss it with their teachers and struggle inwardly until they’ve reached a solution rather than a desire to “check the box” and get the grade. Unfortunately, these are all things that we systematically deny to students by failing to provide them with a meaningfully Catholic curriculum.

The state of reading and writing shows the abject failure of the formation Catholic schools tend to offer. It exposes how at every step of the way we have failed to ask the question with which I began: is this helping students love God, or is it hindering them? When we start thinking seriously about curriculum, we start to realize that every single aspect of our schools is a question of formation.

Everyone who works at a Catholic school is engaged in formation, whether they know it or not. Curriculum is an intentional direction of that formation, in every facet of the education. Formation even extends to how we market the school: do we emphasize timeless truths, or twenty-first century workplace skills? That is not a marketing decision: that is a curricular decision, whether the marketing people realize it or not.

We are always in the process of formation: we have no choice about that. The choice is whether it will be good or bad. A formation-based curriculum is what makes a Catholic school Catholic.