For many, these shifting roles stray too far from traditional values, sparking a yearning to return to times when men were men, and women were simply women.
Well, for those seeking to uphold traditional roles, a new Catholic school named Saint Andrew's Academy in Kentucky aims to provide a comprehensive education. Here, boys will engage in activities such as farming, woodworking, leather crafting, and blacksmithing, in addition to traditional studies.
From Lifesite News:
The academy aims to cultivate a genuine and masculine love for the true, good, and beautiful in the hearts of her students, realizing, as John Senior writes, “the rich potential of their age, which is to know and love the Maker and the things He made with their whole heart, strength and soul as boys.”
The old axiom, “a sound mind in a sound body” underlines the reality that man is an integral being, and echoes the truth that grace builds on nature. Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote, “The heart is commonly reached not through the reason but through the imagination,” which St. Thomas Aquinas defines as the “storehouse of forms received through the senses.” An integral education is one that addresses man as a whole, nourishing his mind, heart, body, and soul.
The way of life at Saint Andrew’s will offer boys many powerful experiences of the good – experiences that foster a rightly formed imagination and give context and meaning to study. Studying the stars (under the stars), climbing mountains, singing sacred and folk music, memorizing poetry, camping under the stars, and witnessing the birth of a calf are examples of authentic experiences that draw the whole person toward the truth.
Regularly attending and serving the Traditional Latin Mass with their friends, beginning and ending each day by singing the Divine Office, and celebrating major feasts with banquets will offer boys an opportunity to enter into the life of the Church, to better understand, appreciate, and love its beauty.
The Academy recognizes the importance of regular, direct contact with truth in its elemental and tangible form (and the benefit and satisfaction to be gained from some good hard work) on the farm and in the workshop. Tending and caring for plants and animals is something that most of men have done for most of time. These elementary and fundamentally human activities provide nourishment not only for the body, but also the mind and soul because they provide regular experience with reality, experiences that are a prerequisite to reflection and abstract thought.
This appears to be a wonderful place to equip young men with the skills they need to thrive in life.
It's refreshing to see an institution unafraid to uphold the teachings of the Bible, instilling in children the understanding that hard work to provide for themselves and others brings them even closer to God.
