Schooling America

 

Apart from one year (1954-1955) in pubic school before I began first grade in our local parish elementary school, my entire primary and secondary education from first grade through high school graduation in 1965 was in parochial schools, which in those days were a kind of hybrid institution. It wasn't a state-funded, free public school open to all. Nor was it really an exclusive and relatively expensive private school. It was a religious institution, run by the Church, primarily for the children of the parish, charging modest tuition ($1.00 per month per family in grade 1-8, modestly more in high school) and otherwise supported by the parishioners' contributions to the parish and the labor of the religious communities (the Dominican Sisters and the Augustinian Fathers) who served the parish. 

In that "baby boom" era, elementary school was crowded. We averaged 50-55 students in a class and had to settle for half-day sessions in grades 1 through 5. We sat at desks facing the teacher, not in circles or facing each other. Nor were any other fads of progressive education indulged in. Like public schools, we were being formed for citizenship, patriotically reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the National Anthem in class. But the animating spirit was religious. We began and ended with prayers. We were taught by Sisters, then in high school by priests, their services in both institutions augmented by dedicated Catholic lay teachers. The textbooks too were Catholic. We studied both American and world history, largely through a patriotic lens, but conspicuously colored by Catholic history and Catholic priorities. Hence, we gave great weight to the early Catholic explorers of the American continent, to such historical events as the first Mass in what is now the U.S., to the impact of religious events on history and of historical events on the Church, and even occasionally to religious and moral reservations about particular policies or practices (e.g., the Puritans' religious intolerance, slavery in the American south, Theodore Roosevelt's aggressive acquisition of the Panama Canal). Where religion was not otherwise implicated, we largely followed by common secular consensus (e.g., Lincoln was a good president, but Reconstruction was ruined by carpetbaggers and scalawags and Andrew Johnson should not have been impeached!).

In today's terms, the type of schooling (religious constituency, traditional conservative pedagogy, centrist politics) we received might most resemble the "classical" schools, journalist James Traub examines (and seems disposed to like) in The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy (Norton, 2026). Of course, the schools I attended (and, I suspect, many others like it) operated with minimal resources. Especially at the elementary level, teachers probably had modest preparation. It would not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that a young woman might go straight from her novitiate year to teaching fifth grade. The amazing thing about it, however, was how well it actually worked. We were not creatively taught, nor were we taught to be creative. But we learned lots of facts, knew our history, could read at grade level or better, wrote grammatically good sentences and paragraphs, and learned how to write a business letter and how a bill became a law. Children and grandchildren of immigrants, we became a somewhat successful middle class, no modest accomplishment for an educational system. 

Of course, some students did better than others. I always liked history and was well disposed by my personality and circumstances to want to learn. On the other hand, I have long since forgotten most of the facts about different places products and industries that we learned in geography. So both sides of the endless pedagogical debate about the value of facts and memorization can take some comfort from my experience. Our education was child-centered only in the sense that children's learning was its focus, not in the contemporary sense of seeking to meet children's own felt or perceived needs or wants. And, while we excelled in our secular subjects, the primary welfare of its students about which the school cared most was always primarily our spiritual welfare. For some students, this may have become burdensome in the end and may now be remembered by some of them as having been relatively repressive. The religious trajectory of my boomer generation may suggest that the schools succeeded more in their secular mission to make middle class productive citizens and maybe succeeded less in their religious mission. There may be some truth to that charge, but it is also the case that the schools' secular mission could never have been accomplished without the  spiritual motivation that animated the heroic effort involved in making the system work as well as it did.

What can most certainly be said in praise of such a system is that it was coherent with the rest of our experience at home with our families and in the neighborhood (which large;y overlapped with the parish) and that it provided us with a shared moral order that admittedly judged and punished but also comforted and rewarded.

That era is in any case now long behind us in the past, and it clearly cannot be brought back again. Yet I find these recollections remain relevant as I reflect upon James Traub's interesting and provocative book about the state of schooling in American today.

Traub's book is in part a travelogue through the many local/state variations in American schooling. He visited a number of public (or, at least, publicly funded) schools across the country to see for himself what students, teachers, and school administrators are doing. His on-site description of actual classrooms  is the animating heart of this book. In the process, however, he also addressed ideological battles about public education in states like Florida - battled largely focused on neuralgic "culture-war" issues about race and sex (and also religion, specifically Christianity). The book is not primarily about overt partisanship from classroom teachers, although such examples appear - including examples on the left in Minneapolis.  Meanwhile, many on-site teachers are somehow trying navigate the complications caused by ideologically inspired directives and the discouraging conditions they experience with the actual students in their classrooms.

Attentive as Traub is to the ideological "culture-wars" which are increasingly paralyzing American schooling, his even bigger concern is that so many students seem to be learning nothing at all. One of his harshest indictments of our American schooling is that so many public school systems prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history, which inevitably results in a greater focus on teaching methods and professional jargon than on students' acquiring actual knowledge. In this vein, Traub criticizes public school educators' widespread opposition to memorization of fcts and historical chronology, the basic source material for citizens' ability to form opinions and engage in democratic discussion and debate. and, like Traub, I am appalled to hear a teacher say that expecting students to read actual books "creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.” I simply can't imagine any teacher from my school days not expecting us to read real books - or caring about our "stress" or whether we felt bad about ourselves!

Hence his fondness for the "classical" school movement, which seems ready-made to produce a more seriously and academically rigorous and civic-minded education. Certainly, he would like to see the "classical" school model embraced more widely than it has been. And, all things considered, he is probably right.

Traub recognizes "that our wildly heterogeneous society cannot be shoehorned into a single kind of school or curriculum." But. he is "convinced that we must restore the centrality of books - of words and language, of facts and knowledge, of the depth of experience that comes only with learning from an early age to navigate challenging texts." Recognizing the corrosive effects of social media, he also insists that "phones must be banned absolutely from the classroom, if not from the school itself." He believes "that our schools must feel different from the surrounding society in some important ways - more respectful of knowledge, of reflection, of difference of opinion." Finally, contrary to our current hyper-individualistic emphases, he agrees with the nation's founders "that democracy cannot survive unless citizens are willing to look to a greater good beyond themselves," and he suspects that "more parents will seek out schools that have an overtly communitarian or ethical culture."

Let us hope so!

Preacher of Truth to the Whole World

 

Today, Saint Paul the Apostle parish and the Society of Missionary Priests (The Paulist Fathers) who have staffed it since their joint founding in 1858 celebrate their patronal feast day of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle.

On July 7, 1858, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, along with fellow former Redemptorist priests Augustine Hewit, George Deshon, and Francis Baker, founded the Society of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul the Apostle, known ever since as “The Paulist Fathers.” Three days later, they were assigned by Archbishop John Hughes to the pastoral care of a new west-side parish named for Saint Paul the Apostle. For almost 170 years, this parish - together with the Paulist Fathers’ life as a religious community in the Church and their wider missionary outreach - have been blessed by the patronage of Saint Paul the Apostle, the feast of whose Conversion we celebrate today.

That great event, monumentally portrayed by Lumen Martin Winter (photo) outside over the main entrance to the church, transformed Paul from an opponent and persecutor of the new Christian community into a disciple of Jesus and put him on an equal footing with the others to whom the Risen Christ had appeared. Now as then, that event highlights for us what it means to be converted to Christ, to become a disciple of Jesus, his witness in the world, and an apostle sent with mission to evangelize, to make disciples of all peoples.  Paul became what the beautiful floor mosaic at the entrance of the church's sanctuary calls “A Preacher of Truth in the whole world.” No wonder Isaac Hecker and his associates chose Paul as their patron!

To understand Paul and appreciate his impact, however, we must begin with the fact that Paul was, first and foremost, a devout Jew, well educated in the Mosaic Law, a Pharisee, that is, a member of the 1st-century group most zealous about religious observance. But he was also a Greek-speaking Jew, from what we call the Diaspora, that is, those living outside the land of Israel. He grew up in what is today Turkey, in a Greek city, and enjoyed the great privilege of Roman citizenship.

All this complexity was very important, because one of the great issues which confronted the apostolic Church was figuring out how Jews and Gentiles were connected in God’s plan for the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ – and how Jews and Gentiles should relate to one another within the one community of the Church. The way this issue was eventually resolved (thanks in no small part to Paul) helped transform what would otherwise have been a small Jewish sect into the biggest and longest-lasting multi-cultural institution in the world.

What Paul experienced when he met the Risen Lord on the way to Damascus was a revelation of God’s plan to include all people in the promises originally made to Abraham and his descendants and now being finally fulfilled in Jesus. The God who revealed himself to Paul in the person of Jesus was the same God whom Paul had always served so enthusiastically as a Jew. What changed was that now Paul recognized Jesus as the One, though whom all people are included in God’s plan of salvation.

And because Paul now understood that it was Jesus who ultimately made the difference, he also recognized that there need be no necessary conflict between Gentile culture and faith in Christ. For the pagan peoples of the Roman Empire, that was good news indeed. It’s easy to see why Paul’s mission was so successful among different types of people and why he appealed to Hecker as a model – Hecker who was so convinced that the Catholic Church was just what American culture needed. The world has changed a lot since Hecker’s time (not to mention Paul’s time), but the Church’s mission remains the same.

Paul had what Hecker so much wanted his Paulists to have, what Hecker called “zeal for souls.” Paul was not one of the original 12. He wasn’t there when Jesus said to his disciples: Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.  But he absorbed those words as surely as if they had been initially addressed to him – as we also must do.

In this era when so. much of religion suffers from being reduced to politics, our time calls for  renewed attention to an unambiguously religiously (rather than politically) formed understanding and experience of mission rooted in that ancient command:  that is to say, evangelizing (proclaiming the Gospel) to all (no exceptions or political priorities) incorporating them fully and visibly into the life of the Church (the continuation of Christ’s life and mission in the world) and living a truly transformed (grace-filled) way of life.

Isaac Hecker had an unwavering commitment to building the Catholic Church, as the extension of the Christ’s Incarnation, in what he (in his time) perceived to be the fertile soil of American society. That same commitment must continue to motivate us, augmented as it must now be by our realistic recognition that our American soil may be less fertile than was once imagined and that making it more so may itself be a crucial component of contemporary mission. 

The Testament of Ann Lee

 

The Testament of Ann Lee is a 2025 historical drama, starring Amanda Seyfried as "Mother Ann," Anne Lee (1736-1784), the founder of the Shakers. The film faithfully recounts the story of Manchester-born Ann Lee, a pious child, with an early acquired aversion to sexual intercourse, who, together with her brother William, associates with a local group of "Shaking Quakers," who claim that the Second Coming of Christ will be incarnate as a woman and who engage in noisy shouting, singing and dancing as their form of worship. Ann marries a fellow Shaker and has four children, all of whom die in infancy. Her sexually unsatisfactory marriage and the deaths of her children seem to reinforce her revulsion against sexual activity.

Meanwhile, Ann becomes one of the most prominent leaders of the group, which leads to her arrest and imprisonment, during which time she has visions, which cause her to teach that fornication was the original sin and that celibacy is the path to salvation. Ann eventually leads a group of Shakers to America, where, despite some setbacks, they found their first settlement at Niskayuna in New York State. Her brother William promotes the cult as an itinerant preacher on her behalf, and the community grows with new converts and the adoption of foundling children. Ann's pacifism gets her arrested by the Continental Army. Having been released by Governor Clinton, however, she continues her mission and founds more Shaker communities in New England. Soon after an attack in which several Shakers are beaten and killed and Ann herself is sexually assaulted and called a witch, William dies. One year later Ann dies. 

Following Ann's somewhat strange life, the film introduces us to the Shakers' distinctive beliefs and, very powerfully, to their special way of worship and their unique hymnody. Seyfried is fantastic as Ann, and her amazing performance truly carries the show. So powerful is her performance that one is easily tempted to identify with Anne and thus to suspend judgment on the community's unorthodox beliefs and even stranger behavior. The Shakers led a very simple life, which coheres with their Quaker origins and the general tenor of post-Reformation sectarianism, but their worship was passionately physical - perhaps providing initial emotional release from the stultifying circumstances of daily life in 18th-century Manchester, and later perhaps also a compensation for the lack of normal sexual outlets. Certainly, one can easily imagine how attractive such an emotional and physical religion might have been to those living in such a socially stratified and relatively repressive society, especially perhaps to women, whom it liberated from sexual subjection to a husband. It presumably made sense to go to America, where such an extremely egalitarian vision might more easily find acceptance, although even in America in the Revolutionary era the sect seemed obviously too extreme for many. (As always with the sectarian wing of the Reformation, their pacifism could and did also alienate some of the surrounding society.)

Surprisingly, the historical Shakers survived Mother Ann's death. (The movie ends there, with no reference to what impact her death might have had on the community's eschatological beliefs. The film is ultimately much more about her personal religious experience than about the Shakers' sectarian trajectory.) By the mid-19th century, there were several thousand Shakers living in at least 18 major communities and some smaller, short-lived communities. Most remaining Shaker sites are now museums (well worth visiting). There remains only one active community - at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, Maine. Until recently, it had only two surviving members, but a third is alleged to have joined the remaining two. It would seem that, whatever the Shakers' contribution to the overall story of sectarian apocalyptic Christianity in America, that contribution has now come to completion.

The U.S. Presidency Thanks to John Adams

 

For almost a century now, January 20 has been Presidential Inauguration Day,  the day power passes from one president to another, a day filled with quaint civic rituals to solemnize the tradition of the peaceful transition of political power, something we generally took for granted as being as American as apple pie - that is, until six years ago. Then we discovered - and have continued to learn ever since - just how fragile republican government really is and the variable human factors on which republican government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power all actually depend. What better time than this, therefore, to revisit the often overlooked but actually quite significant presidency of John Adams, who set so many important presidential precedents, not least that of the peaceful transition of power from one party to another.

There are numerous good biographies of John Adams, but they have largely tended to highlight other (more seemingly successful) aspects of his storied career and focus less on his one-term presidency. In contrast, Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library, focuses almost entirely on Adams as our second president in her new book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Adams served as our first Vice President, under George Washington, who himself set many presidential precedents, including that of excluding his Vice President from serious participation in the Administration. According to Chervinsky, Adams' first of many critical contributions to the new nation's survival was simply proving "that someone else could be president" after Washington left office. "Washington established countless executive precedents, but until they were repeated, they were little more than historic anomalies. Adams forged the parameters of the presidency for everyone that followed."

Key among those parameters, was Adams' forceful assertion of presidential authority over the military and the executive branch itself. "Adams' cabinet secretaries conspired with other Arch Federalists to weaken the presidency, and undermine civilian leadership of the military." Adams successfully reasserted the presidential claim to control the military as a civilian, successfully countered cabinet subversion of his foreign policy initiatives, and by removing recalcitrant cabinet secretaries definitively established presidential power over the cabinet. Also, again at the cost of fracturing his Federalist party and imperiling his own re-election, he secured peace with France. The Treaty of Mortefontaine "represented the pinnacle of Adams' lengthy foreign policy career and validated his economic instincts." Likewise in his attention to the judiciary, Adams recognized "the long-term importance of the bench."

Chervinsky's account of the Adams' administration is detailed and highlights many ways  Adams' semingly transitional presidency has left a long legacy. But perhaps the most significant - especially in the light of our recent history - was his commitment to republican government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power, all of which he demonstrated in his response to the electoral crisis of 1800. That election took place over a period of time. It "was actually a series of elections, first at the state level to control legislatures, then is siew of tates with direct elections for electors, and finally at the electoral college level." Given our recent experience of states' competing to reapportion congressional districts in time for the 2026 midterm elections, her account of the various maneuvers in 1800 to alter the ways electors were to be selected in order to maximize one or other party's advantage seems especially timely. So is the role of personalities and personal relationships. "Government was a small world int he eighteenth century, and politicians often knew each other or were related." While the family backgrounds of contemporary politicians may be much more diverse, modern media has made politics a small world agin in a different way, whcih also highlights personalities and personal relationships.

Famously, the election of 1899 resulted in a tie which threatened the very survival of the system. "Jefferson flirted with political violence and came perilously close to upending democratic institutions." In the end, however, Adams and Jefferson "put aside petty grievances nad worked together, honoring their commitment to basic civic virtue." Everyone knows Adams did not attend Jefferson's inaugural (which he was not particularly expected to do), but Chervinsky details the ways in which he and the executive departments cooperated with and assisted the incoming administration, another valuable precedent. 

Sandwiched in between Washington and Jefferson, Adams never. made to Mount Rushmore. His actual contributions as president deserve to be remembered, however, and the precedents he set - especially in regard to republican government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power have served the U.S. very well. In view of more recent events and our present sleepwalking flirtation with despotism, those precedents deserve to be recalled, and their author deserves to be better remembered and honored.

The Future Is Burning

 

Wildfires have increased everywhere - even in such unfamiliar locales as the New York City metropolitan area. But, in 2025, the apparent capital of contemporary wildfires interfacing with highly populated metropolitan centers was California, specifically the city of Los Angeles, where some of the worst wildfires in California history erupted onJanuary 7, 2025, in the Pacific Palisades and later in Altadena. Senior Political and National Correspondent for MSNOW Jacob Soboroff covered those fires as they burned and has now recounted that experience and analyzed its meaning in Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster (HarperCollins, 2026).

Soboroff is an accomplished correspondent, who has covered both natural and human-made disasters. His previous book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (2020), detailed the first Trump Administration's systematic separation of immigrant families at the border and exposed the policy's devastating impact. He is also an LA native and resident, who brings to this account a personal story of family and community impacted by apparently unexpected (but perfectly predictable) calamity. His on-air coverage, faithfully recorded in the book, and his depictions of his experience covering the fire in the places where he grew up among others he had grown up with give this book an intensely personal feel, simultaneously celebrating rootedness and lamenting loss. In this age of delocalized globalism, with its endemic loss of commitments to places and local communities, Soboroff's account offers unexpected inspiration, even as it recounts a catastrophic calamity and countless personal, familial, and neighborhood experiences of loss. At one point, surveying the somehow still standing synagogue where he had once had his Bar Mitzvah, Soboroff acknowledged, "I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be."

The January 2025 Firestorm was the result of a deadly combination of high wind gusts, low humidity, and accumulated dry vegetation.  As difficult as were the personal losses and environmental devastation Soboroff recounts is his on-site, real-time reporting on how certain prominent public figures responded to the disaster. California Governor Gavin Newsom and lame-duck President Joe Biden (who just happened to be on the scene when the fires started) both responded creditably, as we used to expect al our public officials to do. Elon Musk,  however, posted misinformation on his social platform "X," and President-elect Donald Trump  falsely claimed that Governor Newsom was withholding water that should have been available to fight the fires.

Obviously, the most compelling parts of the book are scenes of turmoil which Soboroff describes so well, his interviews with first responders struggling to maneuver fire trucks running out of fuel and hydrants low on water pressure, and his poignant conversations with those who lost virtually everything in a moment of horror. No less important, however, ishis treatment of the terrible political context — not just Trump’s spreading misinformation about the fires and berating the Governor and other officials for being ineffective — but also the policies of the second Trump administration in the months since the fires to “refute, dismantle, or outright eliminate valuable resources within the federal government’s arsenal to communicate about, respond to, mitigate, or prevent disasters.”

As contributing factors to the 2025 LA tragedy and also setting the stage for the future, he identifies the global climate emergency, infrastructure disintegration, the changes in the ways we now live, and our politics of blame and disinformation. That is what makes his riveting account of last year's calamity in California a warning and a challenging portent about "America's New Age of Disaster."