This month, we are excited to announce our next CLT School Spotlight: Chesterton Academy of Milwaukee!
Located in Menomonee Falls, WI, Chesterton Academy exists to help parents raise up a generation of joyful saints and leaders, educated in the classical, liberal arts tradition and the truths of the Catholic faith, in order to serve the common good.
Keep reading to learn more about Chesterton Academy, the distinctives of classical Catholic education, and how schools can form students intellectually, morally, and spiritually
What makes Chesterton Academy of Milwaukee unique?
Our academic curriculum is primarily defined by one end achieved in three parts. The end we seek is to help parents form saints and leaders. To achieve this end, we see students as whole persons and seek to form them in faith, reason, and virtue. In faith, we strive to draw students closer to the Lord through regular prayer and spiritual formation. In reason, we provide students an integrated curriculum in a chronological structure, forming them to be careful readers of their tradition and also clear articulators of that tradition in the modern world.
Our curriculum introduces all students not only to literature and mathematics, philosophy and science, but also to drama, dance, choir, and art. Finally, we seek to form students in virtue by developing habits of excellence in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in the world.
As our patron, G.K. Chesterton writes, “The one thing that is not taught in public schools is that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it, we are happy.”
What has your experience been like with CLT? How does CLT fit in with your mission? What effects have you seen on your students and staff?
Chesterton Academy of Milwaukee’s experience with the CLT has been shaped by the content and nature of the test. It allows our students to experience a type of assessment with the understanding that education is both formative in what and how to think. In order to cultivate students within an educational vision, the curriculum and all of the features around it, must introduce a grammar (foundational building blocks of understanding and communication) as well as logic and rhetoric – how to use that grammar to then know the truth and convince others of it.
The CLT models this in its content and structure. The CLT fits in with our mission since it models that two-fold emphases on what and how to think. It also strives to be an excellent test, adapting and changing over times with updates to its own material.
Here at Chesterton Academy, we believe that our students should strive for excellence in their habits and their pursuits with Christ as their end. As to the effects, having a test where our students can see how they are performing across the nation with other schools learning similar curriculum is formative for us. The test also has given us a general schema as to areas we can improve in our classrooms and how to help our students better understand how to think, write, and speak well, the foundation of any strong education.
We are grateful to partner with Chesterton Academy of Milwaukee! You can learn more about Chesterton Academy by visiting their website here, or listen to our episode of The Anchored Podcast with Dr. Eric DeMeuse, Headmaster of Chesterton Academy of Milwaukee and Senior Academic Dean of the Chesterton Schools Network.