Training the Soul: The Chesterton Academy

By Chuck Colson
11/17/2008

For most people, the one-room schoolhouse is just something out of the history books. For 11 students in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, the one-room schoolhouse is a living reality. Their tiny, brand-new school, Chesterton Academy, is an experiment that could be the start of what’s been called an “education revolution.”

Named after the great Christian thinker and writer G. K. Chesterton—one of my own favorite apologists—the high school was founded by two Catholic gentlemen, Thomas Bengston and Dale Ahlquist. They were concerned, rightly, that kids today are not being taught to think in school, and instead are having their minds filled with moral relativism.

They’re being deprived of the intellectual and moral knowledge that would help them develop into fully rounded, mature, thinking citizens. Headmaster John DeJak, who gave up a successful career as an attorney to help lead the effort, sums it up this way: “We realized that our kids are being robbed.”

So the curriculum at Chesterton Academy emphasizes the traditions and heritage of Western civilization that are too often ignored by most of our public schools and, certainly, our colleges. the rest