“Catholic education ceases to exist” if Catholic schools adopt Common Core, so says a theology professor at St. Joseph’s seminary in New York.
Writing for The Catholic Thing, David G. Bonagura, Jr., said that Catholic schools will become just like public schools, except that they will have “uniforms and religion classes, [and] charge tuition,” if Common Core is implemented.
“Catholic education begins on the premise that a loving, rational God created an ordered and purposed universe that points human beings back to Him.” Bonagura wrote reflecting on the unique identity that Catholic schools would surrender by implementing Common Core. “In studying creation and all its features, including human beings and their works, we discover truths that shed further light on the mystery of God, the ultimate Truth.”
Catholic schools also have a “pedagogical method” grounded in the liberal arts—in which there is progression of stages from grammar to logic to rhetoric, according to Bonagura.
Common Core will disrupt both a Catholic school’s identity and method if implemented, he continued. It’s another educational fad, similar to the Whole Language program in the 1980s and 1990s—the latter was a failure and Bonagura believes the former will be, too.
Bonagura offered the example of a classmate of his who was ill prepared for Catholic high school because his public elementary school rejected phonics and traditional grammar in lieu of following the Whole Language approach.
On the other hand Bonagura argues that the Catholic school method is “tried and true;” it does not “shortchange” students with “ineffective educational fads or theories that perpetuate ignorance rather than knowledge.”
Now with the implementation of Common Core in his children’s school, Bonagura observes that traditional math computation is being put on the back burner for learning how to explain math verbally. The video below illustrates Lattice math, a method that is required to solve problems at some schools using Common Core, according to Bonagura. Bonagura said that he knows of a teacher who is “teaching computation in this verbose way, and [the student] is required to solve it in this way.”
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