Three years ago, Ben Strong and others founded St. Andrew’s Academy in Verona, Ky. It’s a Catholic boarding school and farm for high school boys which “aims to cultivate a genuine and masculine love for the true, good, and beautiful in the hearts of her students.” Students who attend St. Andrews receive a classical education, reading and discussing great literature and delving into history and the other liberal arts. At the same time, the students participate in a wide range of extracurricular activities, from singing folk songs and ballads to hiking to juggling and farm work.

Strong is an alumnus of Gregory the Great Academy in Pennsylvania, which offers a similar mission and program for young men. A third school, St. Martin’s Academy in Kansas, tracks this same regimen of study, work, and play with its students.

The educational philosophy for this trio of academies is rooted in the teachings of John Senior, a professor chiefly remembered as a founder of the now defunct Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas and for two books, “The Death of Christian Culture” and “The Restoration of Christian Culture.” Though Senior died in 1999, his vision of an education grounded in tradition, faith, joy, and reality lives on through schools such as these and in the individuals he taught.

Several particulars set these academies apart from most other schools. Most obviously, they are boarding schools for boys, thereby following a tradition that fell from favor beginning in the 1970s. The objective here is to avoid the distractions of the opposite sex, focus on the projects at hand, and foster brotherhood.

In addition, these schools proudly embrace and teach the positives of manhood through classics like “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” “Beowulf,” Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” and more. The literature read by the students and the poems they memorize celebrate virtue and the worthiness of living with honor.

The extracurricular life at these schools reinforces what is learned in the classroom. Rugby and soccer are the favored sports, and all students participate unless prevented by some physical handicap or illness. Many of the songs they learn, some of them old Scottish or Irish ballads, tell stories of men facing challenges. There are introductory classes to the trades, and the demands of the working farms run from mucking out stalls to slaughtering chickens for the dining room.

Cell phones and laptops are not discouraged in these schools; they are forbidden outright. A student wishing to communicate with a friend outside of the school, female or otherwise, writes letters. The exclusion of screens also ensures that students engage daily and face-to-face with one another and with their teachers and proctors.

Finally, all three schools are small compared to most other institutions. None exceed 70 students, not from a lack of applications but from a deliberate policy. In the eyes of the administrators and teachers, small is most definitely beautiful.

My son-in-law is a graduate of Gregory the Great, and has worked there for the last six years as supervisor of the building and grounds while teaching crafts and Euclidean geometry to the boys. His oldest son is also a recent graduate of the school. Consequently, I have witnessed first-hand the comradery bred by this school, the fierce loyalty of its alumni, and the good men such a program has produced.

The most valuable lesson offered the rest of us by all three schools is straightforward and basic. If we want our sons to become good men, we should make that goal a consequence of their education. We should raise them to admire heroes worthy of emulation, not the celebrities who today command so much attention. We should teach them the classic virtues. We should see to it that they encounter real life in nature and with human beings rather than playing games and living out fantasies on smartphones and screens.

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful,” runs a Plato quote on the Saint Andrew’s website. This beauty can be found in diverse realms as religious faith, art, literature, nature, mathematics, and human interaction, but it is useless unless appreciated and made a part of our interior landscape.

Fail to instill these character qualities into young men, and we find the consequences predicted long ago in C. S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man”: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

At no other time in our country’s history have we been in such need of good men, men who can distinguish right from wrong and who aren’t afraid to speak out for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Such men are made, not born. If we wish to grow our boys into true manhood, to become stallions rather than geldings, it’s up to us – parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, and mentors – to nourish and guide them on that quest.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: PickPik