The Jesuit School has as its mission the dissemination of information that parents of current and prospective students—as well as alumni—might wish to consider.
Much of this information has to do with the current state of Jesuit secondary education, especially with its willingness to integrate various ideas springing from postmodern Critical Theory—including Critical Race Theory—into Catholic Social Teaching.
Many parents also realize that the universities and colleges their children will enter from Jesuit high schools house prevailing cultural ideas that cannot be questioned with impunity.
The Jesuit School will, therefore, serve as a repository of information regarding institutions of higher education—and how to survive their descent into postmodern madness—throughout this country.
There remain a comparative few institutions of higher learning whose curriculum requirements demonstrate a love for learning substantially free from the consuming passions of the era in which we live.
These institutions, whether Catholic or otherwise, are institutions that will not seek to change the values with which you have raised your children.
These institutions are unafraid of teaching the hows and whys of the failures, corruption, and evils that exist throughout all time, but they also know that teaching a steady stream of anguish, shame, and anger about the past is an abuse of young minds and of the nation and civilization in which they reside.
Furthermore, these institutions have not fallen into the trap of moral relativism and curricular relevance that believes students in 2021 are already wise about the ways of the world even as they remain ignorant of the treasures of Western Civilization. The Jesuit School tips its hat toward their way of proceeding.
Nothing in my experience as a teacher of public school students nor in my experience living on an Indian reservation and working in the Peace Corps affirms what Critical Theorists, most of whom live in the fragile precincts of Academia, claim to be true about the world or about the United States.
The Jesuit School eyes the educational institutions established by the Society of Jesus in the United States from the perspective of an alumnus of both Dallas Jesuit, Class of 1968, and Cincinnati’s Xavier University, Class of 1972, who, during his own teaching career, taught only in public schools.
It was as a student in a Jesuit high school that I first thought about becoming a teacher, and it was as a student at a Jesuit university that I decided to make that happen eventually. My deep and abiding respect for what Jesuit educational institutions have accomplished in the past and can accomplish in the future for their students does not alleviate my concerns about their current all-too-trendy and foolish state.
They will not see it that way, of course. They see themselves proceeding toward a more just world. They are enthralled by Good Think.
I am not.
The Jesuit School is the responsibility of Daniel Maher, a Catholic and a sinner, the latter characteristic being the single identity that binds us all together in the human family.