EDUCATION
A NEW BOYS’ HIGH SCHOOL “PREPARES THE SOIL” ST. MARTIN’S ACADEMY COLLABORATES WITH “GOD THE FARMER” SO THAT HOLINESS CAN TAKE ROOT AND FLOURISH n BY DANIEL KERR*
guide every decision we make. These commitments are: to awaken wonder, to heal the imagination, to restore authentic masculinity, and to develop attentiveness. I’d like to consider these commitments specifically within the framework of three well-chosen realities of the place, namely that it is: a boarding school, without screens, on a working farm. In the first place, our boys’ full-time residence is an essential part of our mission. Education is not a 9 to 5 proposition. In order to make a compelling counteroffer to the bombardment of mainstream media, an entire culture needs to be t St. Martin’s Academy articulated, and then lived. in Fort Scott, Kansas, The building of such a culture our goal is simple: to requires constant attention to create good soil. And as a detail across every front: the boarding school for boys that way we worship, the prayers combines classical acadewe pray, the songs we sing, mics with a practical work the books we read, the clothes program on a farm, that soil we wear, the food we eat, our building takes a variety of manners at the table, the jokes forms. we laugh at (and don’t laugh In a literal sense, it is done at), the games we play in our in our pastures and gardens – lesson during one of the many excursions in contact leisure time. The result is a a farm is only as healthy as its An outdoors with nature taken by students at the Academy discipulus with first-hand soil. But in the deeper and experience in the art of living well. more mystical sense, our soil building happens in the Further, the boarding environment offers boys souls of the young men entrusted to our care. Deus something that is altogether lost today in Western culAgricola est. God is a farmer, says Saint Augustine, ture: a rite of passage. Jason Craig, in Leaving Boyand as educators we are but collaborators with God, hood Behind, notes that in nearly every culture, boys chiefly by helping to get the soil right – that is, by on their way to manhood have gone through a rite of putting in order the natural conditions in which the passage that consistently includes the elements of sepsupernatural can take root and flourish. aration, initiation and incorporation. A boarding Ultimately, our mission, the reason why we exist, is school is uniquely positioned to deliver this three-part for sainthood. More than savvy politicians, brilliant rite of passage. scientists and princes of the public square, the world Take separation, for example. Each school year needs saints, the true movers of history who walk cirbegins with difficult, sometimes teary, goodbyes as cumspectly, redeeming the times. This all may sound our 9th graders bid farewell to their family, and in a rather lofty, but frankly there is just no other reason for particular way, to their mothers. I formerly considered us to exist. And as Pope Piux XI makes clear in his this to be an unfortunate, circumstantial by-product of encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, sainthood is the aim our being a boarding school. But increasingly it has of Christian education because it is the end for which become clear that this painful separation is an we were made. To build good soil, therefore, St. Marabsolutely essential part of these boys’ maturation. tin’s adheres to four pedagogical commitments that And as he sowed, there were grains that fell beside the path, so that all the birds came and ate them up. And others fell on rocky land, where the soil was shallow; they sprang up all at once, because they had not sunk deep in the ground; but as soon as the sun rose they were parched; they had taken no root, and so they withered away. Some fell among briers, so that the briers grew up, and smothered them. But others fell where the soil was good, and these yielded a harvest, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. —Matthew 13: 4-8
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INSIDE THE VATICAN DECEMBER 2020
