John Senior’s Star Is Rising

It never sat with those of us blessed to know him. I was privileged to count Him as a personal friend. He and I used to attend daily Mass together. He was already a thorough-going Trad, whilst I was still on my journey to Traddom. There was no TLM available, but every morning he was in the back pew of our Parish Church, quietly praying his Rosary.

From Crisis

By Sean Fitzpatrick

John Senior's project to restore learning to education is sending up new shoots across America, with St. Andrew's Academy in Kentucky celebrating its second year.

John Senior was a professor at Kansas University in the 1970s. Along with his colleagues Dennis Quinn and Frank Nelick, he founded the storied Integrated Humanities Program—and chances are, if you are a Catholic who holds any interest in education or culture, you have heard of him.

Dr. Senior’s legacy has been gaining traction in recent years. People are reading his thumpingly good book The Restoration of Christian Culture. They are finding article after article hailing his pedagogical influence. They are listening to his recorded conversations. They are poring over his biography. They are learning that prominent converts to the Faith were his students and discovering his ties to centers of American Catholicism like Thomas Aquinas College. And now, another school has been founded in the growing tradition of John Senior: St. Andrew’s Academy in Kentucky.

But what does it mean to be a “John Senior school?” For one thing, it means to be as unique as Senior, Quinn, and Nelick’s courses in the humanities were unique. They were unscripted, free-wheeling conversations about the timeless works of Western Civilization, where the old teachers conversed freely with each other and the young students listened and learned. And even though the matters at hand were not presented from a Catholic standpoint—KU being a secular institution—truth, goodness, and beauty shone through. (And, as has been told, the program suffered a “death by administration” for its unmistakable Catholic character.)

These three professors allowed their humanity, faith, and experience to engage the students over the greatest that has been thought and said, along with those arts of the muses that enhance higher education, such as poetry, music, dancing, and stargazing. Their students were enthralled, found purpose, fell in love, converted to the Faith, and became fathers, mothers, monks, priests, and professionals with a cultural sensitivity, having been “Born in Wonder” as the motto and methods of the IHP promised. 

They went on pilgrimage. They homeschooled. Some even became bishops. Some actually traveled to Germany, at Dr. Senior’s advice, to ask Josef Pieper where the Benedictine monastic tradition was alive. They were directed by Pieper to Fontgombault Abbey in France, from whence came Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma under Abbot Philip Anderson, of the IHP.

Today, the Senior inspiration is growing more prevalent with his vision of education that is so old it is forgotten but now seems brand new. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know,” which is exactly what education should not be. 

Denouncing those who systematize and stagnate school in this way, John Senior wrote in his unpublished work The Restoration of Innocence: An Idea of a School:

They often say derisively, “He teaches himself instead of the subject.” But he is the subject. If there is reason for derision it isn’t such teaching but the failure (usually the vanity) of the teacher. Every teacher teaches himself. And every student studies himself.

And this idea of teaching, of humanity and experience as education, is becoming a presence in this country as John Senior’s star rises.

Some IHP students founded schools over the last 30 years where the imaginative arts and intellectual discourses that changed their lives could take root in another generation. Their educational model cultivates poetic knowledge, the instinctual knowledge of experience, and practical encounters with reality. These schools assembled faculties that teach through conversation and friendship with students who learn poetry and songs by heart, play rugged sports, read the classics, and do farm chores. 

A “John Senior school” is one that embraces the poetic tradition of learning through leisure, with good books before great books, with wonder before wisdom. A John Senior school is an integration between a monastery, a barracks, a large homeschooling family, and a pirate ship. A John Senior school is unapologetically and vigorously Catholic, enshrining the traditions of liturgy, prayer, and the perennial wisdom and faith of the Church, and it leaps with the joy of the saints. John Senior schools are hard to find, but as this Catholic teacher’s star rises, schools are appearing that are born in the wonder he brought to his students.
St. Andrew’s Academy in Kentucky is the third such school, following in the steps of its forerunners and brother schools: Gregory the Great Academy in Pennsylvania (where I teach) and St. Martin’s Academy in Kansas. St. Andrew’s is a boarding school for boys in high school and has just completed its second year of operation—and it is thriving. Like St. Gregory’s and St. Martin’s, St. Andrew’s emphasizes poetry, prayer, manual labor, and agriculture. Students undertake ancient works like Euclid’s Elements, Homer, and Beowulf. They assist at the Traditional Latin Mass, chant the Divine Office, spend time out of doors, and learn practical skills and activities that bring joy—like folk music, plays, and juggling.

St. Andrew’s Academy is another instance of an exciting trajectory in American Catholic education: one that actually respects the difference of the sexes and so embraces a single-sex environment for high school; one that bravely recognizes the dangers of today’s technology and so abolishes the cell phone and the computer; one that boldly remediates where the culture has grown depleted and so provides a richness of experience, filling up the senses so the mind can, in turn, be filled—and on from there, the soul as well.

This trend of the John Senior school is great news for America. And with St. Andrew’s, there is further normalization of an educational model that sadly went extinct—but one that can resurface and spread like wildfire. Just as three men began to change the landscape of Catholic education in America, now three schools are taking up their achievements and making the difference that could make all the difference. It just takes a few men and a few schools who are stalwart enough to respond to the current crisis by taking up the mantle of a clear giant of our times.

And Catholics should be prepared and poised to join this movement to make Catholic education great again. St. Andrew’s needs our support as it raises an old banner with bright new colors over the educational wasteland of this country and, sad to say, the Church. Schools like this, carrying on the legacy of John Senior and his colleagues, understand that true education is more than the mere memorization of information or the assimilation of facts. True education is a cultivation of soul that, as St. John Henry Newman says in his Idea of a University, “implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character.” 

The formation of character implies an active character, and that character, that subject, again as Senior posits, is the teacher and the student. The more honest a teacher is about who he is, the more honest will his students become, beholding who they themselves are in the shared light of their educator who leads them joyfully, as a flesh-and-blood person, out of Plato’s cave of shadows—teachers who teach themselves so that students can learn who they are and through who they are establish an atmosphere of friendliness and mutual understanding.

This relationship is called rapport, and it is the teaching relationship championed by St. John Bosco, wherein mutual trust and respect is nurtured in a spirit of friendship, sympathy, and cooperation. The teacher who is actually and clearly interested in helping people become better and more fulfilled will win the hearts of students. That is at the heart of what makes a John Senior school (though it could also be called a St. John Bosco school, or a Salesian school). 

Rapport arises when this human understanding between them takes shape: that the teacher sincerely cares about the welfare of the student and the student appreciates this and acts accordingly. When rapport is established, a teacher can become a positive influence as a person upon people, and the students will strive to please those whom they love, for love is the beginning and end of rapport. And love, as Christ taught His friends, is impossible without a human connection.

As St. Andrew’s shows, John Senior is still causing people to be born in wonder, and it is little wonder when the wisdom he wielded was the eternal goodness, truth, and beauty of the Almighty. When inviting students to try out the Integrated Humanities Program, John Senior used to smilingly quote Our Lord by saying, “Come and see.” Our Lord still invites us to come and see, and schools like St. Andrew’s should be seen by all who value Catholic education and Catholic culture in America.