More on St. Midas, Part 2: Three Suggestions for a Return to the Humanities

In Part 1 of my follow-up to my recent article in Commonweal, I attempted to explain how Catholic high schools encourage the achievement culture without perhaps realizing it. Online gradebooks, I argued, play a major part in fostering an “education-as-consumption” mindset, in which students are made to understand their classes as opportunities for them to gobble information in order to receive accolades. I think that most Catholic educators would agree that this is not what a Catholic school culture should be. So what should we do?

More on St. Midas, Part 1: Identifying the Problem

­­­­Thanks to Commonweal for running my piece on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Catholic schools. It's online now and is forthcoming in their print magazine. It’s been a while since I wrote the article, and in revisiting it in recent weeks, I realized that I have quite a bit more to say on the topic of the achievement culture and Catholic Ed.