The vision of education that informs St. Gregory’s Academy can appear at once familiar and strange. Although it is traditional, it sometimes disappoints the expectations and received categories by which traditional education is evaluated in our day.
At St. Gregory’s we seek to recover the fullness of meaning behind these educational categories so as to overcome the false oppositions that can prevent students from really loving and appropriating the good, the true, and the beautiful. For example, much of the movement to recover traditional education is concerned with the recovery and perfection of reason. In the face of an epidemic of sloppy and addled thinking, teachers apply the remedy of logic. We too prescribe this remedy, but we believe that it is not enough and that left to itself, or the overemphasis of it, produces more disease. Man does not live by reason alone, not even reason perfected by logic. Borne aloft by music and poetry, reason learns new steps that introduce it to a dance in which it moves beyond itself, and becomes a fit partner for the Divine Word.
