Objection 1. It seems that public charter schools are a good and prudent choice for Catholic communities in 2026. For in this age of high taxation and burdensome private tuitions, such schools grant families from a range of economic backgrounds access to rigorous, smaller-scale learning environments that often emphasize classical methods and virtue formation. Recent expansions in school choice and legal developments have made it possible for parents to direct public resources toward options that escape the worst failures of traditional school districts1, thereby fulfilling the natural duty of parents to provide fitting education without impoverishing the household.
Objection 2. Further, it appears fitting that charter schools, enjoying greater autonomy than conventional public institutions, may adopt classical curricula focused on the liberal arts and character development, which are appropriate to Catholic families. Parents can then supply the specifically Catholic dimension—doctrine, liturgy, and moral formation—through the home and parish, thus achieving a harmonious division of labor suited to the pluralistic conditions of modern society while still benefiting from taxpayer support that reduces the financial barrier to quality schooling.
Objection 3. Moreover, in 2026 it seems unwise and even contrary to subsidiarity to reject public funding altogether. By participating in charter arrangements, Catholic communities may reclaim resources already extracted from the faithful through taxation, promote academic excellence and traditional values within the existing system, and gradually weaken the monopoly of progressive ideologies over education. Isolation from public mechanisms risks leaving Catholic children in inferior environments, whereas strategic engagement allows the Church’s wisdom to influence the broader culture from within available structures.
Objection 4. Public charter schools are permitted to adopt a classical model that meets the criteria of a classical education while fulfilling modern educational standards. In 2026, many charter schools and associated programs successfully incorporate the Trivium, the Socratic Method, logic, rhetoric, Great Books, and other traditional subjects, offering rigorous academics and a structured alternative to the failures of conventional public schooling while allowing parents to supply specifically Catholic formation at home or in the parish.
Objection 5. It seems fitting that public charter schools emerge from within a Catholic community, since Catholics form part of the general American public and, as taxpayers, ought to have a voice in directing how their public tax dollars are spent. As members of the broader community, they possess the same right as any other group to petition for and support charter schools aligned with their values and educational vision, provided the resulting school remains open to all students.
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On the contrary, Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (On the Christian Education of Youth) states that “To be [a fit place for Catholic students], it is necessary that all the teaching and the whole organization of the school, and its teachers, syllabus and text-books in every branch, be regulated by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal supervision of the Church.”2 This cannot be legally done by a public charter school in the American context.
I answer that public charter schools are not fit for Catholic communities interested in classical studies. The reasons are manifold and may be set forth as follows.
The Public School Model
First, the very structure of the modern public school—whether traditional or chartered—is a historical novelty unknown to Catholic tradition. It arose in the mid-nineteenth century through the efforts of Horace Mann and was radically reshaped in the early twentieth century by John Dewey amid the Industrial Revolution. As the educational reformer Dewey himself observed, the industrial transformation produced “vast manufacturing centers,” worldwide markets, and the idling of children by child-labor laws; consequently “only an equally radical change in education” would suffice.3 Schools were deliberately redesigned on the factory model: children arranged in rows and processed by age through standardized grade levels, treated as raw material to be formed for democratic citizenship and industrial efficiency rather than for wisdom.
This age/grade level, time-based, assembly-line system was never the manner in which Catholic students pursued learning. In the ages of faith, education proceeded through monasteries, cathedral schools, universities, and private tutelage by Masters. Students of varying ages advanced together or individually as ability permitted; the order of studies followed the logical hierarchy of the arts and sciences, not the calendar or the state’s administrative convenience. The seven liberal arts—Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy—were studied repeatedly at deepening levels, ordered ultimately to Theology, “the queen of the sciences.” The end was not civic utility or workforce readiness but the formation of the human person for truth and goodness, and ultimately for union with God.4
Two Inevitable Outcomes
Second, because charter schools receive public money they remain subject to the same legal and constitutional restrictions that bind all American public institutions. They must be non-sectarian; they cannot teach philosophy or religion as true. Recent attempts to establish explicitly religious charters have been ruled unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause and analogous state provisions5, confirming that public funding entails a secular character incompatible with Catholic ends. Classical Catholic education, however, seeks to know the truth—both natural truths through the liberal arts and philosophy, and supernatural truths through divine revelation. It cannot bracket or relativize these truths without ceasing to be itself. To present a charter school as a vehicle for such formation while operating under public constraints would be a misrepresentation of the public compact: taxpayer funds, levied for civic purposes, are diverted to ends that are properly private and religious. On the contrary, if such philosophical and religious ends are not the explicit goal of the charter school, then the school by definition could not be meeting the ends proper to classical or Catholic education.
In the scenario of a Catholic community petitioning for and operating such a charter school, two outcomes are inevitable: either the school covertly seeks to advance Catholic philosophical and religious formation while publicly claiming compliance with non-sectarian rules — constituting a misuse of taxpayer funds levied for civic rather than confessional purposes — or it genuinely complies with those prohibitions and thereby offers a merely secular or neutrally ‘values-based’ education that falls short of the ends of classical Catholic schooling.
Erosion of Subsidiarity
Third, the tax-funded model of schooling is itself liberal rather than conservative in character. It steadily expands the power of the centralized state over local communities, families, and the Church. Per-pupil expenditures in public elementary and secondary schools have risen substantially in real terms over recent decades, reaching averages exceeding $16,000–$17,000 in recent fiscal years, with total national spending in the hundreds of billions and continuing upward pressure.6 This growth creates larger government bureaucracies, increases the proportion of local workers whose livelihoods depend on state revenue, and generates political incentives for ever-greater taxation and spending among those who benefit from the system. Such dynamics erode subsidiarity—the principle that higher authorities should not usurp functions properly belonging to lower ones—and replace the natural authority of parents and parishes with the authority of the administrative state. Such government oversight and pressure would surely be present in a public charter school, if not initially, certainly over time.
The Proper Catholic Ends Are Not Attainable
Finally, the proper ends of classical Catholic education cannot be realized within this framework. Those ends, as set forth by the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, are the formation of the human person by means of the seven liberal arts, ordered to the knowledge of causes, “for the perfection of the intellect in truth and the will in goodness.”7 True classical Catholic study is self-paced and mastery-based, lifelong, and integrated under Theology. The model seeks to produce wise men and saints, not competent citizens or productive workers. Charter schools, even those styled “classical,” remain bound to age/grade level progression, standardized testing aligned with state civic and economic goals, and legal prohibitions against confessional teaching. They therefore retain the very modern structures that true classical proponents rightly reject as incompatible with the tradition. Programs that explicitly distinguish themselves from public or charter models do so precisely because the public framework cannot be redeemed for Catholic purposes. It is helpful to keep in mind that private curricula can both pursue proper Catholic ends and also meet compulsory educational requirements.8 But a public charter school can only do the latter.
Conclusion
Thus it is clear that public charter schools, whatever their substantial attractions in 2026, are not a fitting instrument for Catholic communities that seek the authentic classical education enjoyed by the wise and the saints. The ancient paths remain open to those willing to study them outside the constraints of the modern public school system, but it will take wisdom to determine how such an education can be pursued by any given Catholic community.
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Reply to Objection 1. It must be granted that charter schools often escape some of the worst failures of traditional district schools—overt progressive indoctrination and severe behavioral disorder being among them—and that recent school-choice expansions have offered relief to families of modest means burdened by high taxation or private tuition. Nevertheless, this does not make them a prudent or fitting choice for Catholic communities seeking classical education.
Charter schools remain bound by the same foundational defects of the modern public model: the factory-style, age/grade level, time-based system introduced by Horace Mann and perfected by the educational reformer John Dewey to serve industrial and civic ends.9 They do not escape the core structure that treats children as raw material processed for democratic socialization (future voters) and economic utility (future workers) rather than as souls in God’s image to be baptized and formed in wisdom and sanctity according to their personal dispositions and abilities. Nor do such schools escape the legal restrictions inherent to public funding, which prohibit teaching philosophy or religion as true and thus prevent the true integration of the seven liberal arts under the queen of the sciences, Theology—the very heart of classical Catholic education.
The apparent financial advantage is therefore gained at the price of compromised integrity. The Catholic tradition has always held that the formation of children in truth and holiness holds primacy over material convenience. When American public systems proved inadequate or hostile, the Church responded not by seeking to redirect tax dollars under restrictive conditions, but by establishing her own schools. Settling for financial relief while retaining the essential modern framework introduces a false economy that trades the supernatural end of education for temporal benefits.
Reply to Objection 2. The proposed division of student formation—so called “classical” academics in the charter school and Catholic formation at home—rests on a false separation. Such division is already encouraged for students attending public school and participating in parish education programs. But it is widely known and evident that such students do not emerge as well formed Catholic adults or with mastery of the classical liberal arts. If education is the formation of the whole person, the school environment, its methods, its authorities, and its implicit worldview shape the intellect and will even when explicit religious instruction is absent. The liberal arts themselves, when pursued outside their proper ordering to Theology, lose their historical orientation to the full perfection of the human person, the end to which the Catholic intellectual heritage is directed. Merely supplementing at home or with parish religious educational programs is gravely inadequate.
Reply to Objection 3. Strategic participation in the tax-funded system does not restore subsidiarity but perpetuates and enlarges the very structures that undermine it. By accepting public money and its attendant regulations, Catholic communities strengthen the state’s claim over education and weaken the incentive to build independent institutions. The historical witness of the Church—from the monastic schools of the early Middle Ages to the parochial system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—shows that fidelity to her own ends requires the courage to maintain distinct and self-supporting forms of education rather than to borrow the mechanisms of a secular order.
Reply to Objection 4. Unfortunately, even when charter schools or programs styled as “classical” adopt certain traditional elements, they ordinarily implement the counterfeit “classical education” movement that arose within Protestant evangelical circles in the late twentieth century, rather than recovering the authentic classical Catholic tradition.
This fake classical education movement did not arise from within the Catholic intellectual tradition. It emerged and was largely driven in the United States among Protestants reacting against progressive public education while remaining shaped by modern philosophy and cultural conservatism. Its most influential source is Dorothy Sayers’ speculative early twentieth century essay The Lost Tools of Learning, which proposes that the Trivium consists of three developmental “stages” of childhood—the grammar stage, logic stage, and rhetoric stage—based on modern child psychology rather than on the historical disciplines of the liberal arts. As the Classical Liberal Arts Academy demonstrates, “the ‘stages of learning’ spoken of by Dorothy Sayers have nothing to do with classical education” and constitute “a novelty itself and no return to classical liberal arts education.”10
Popularizers such as Douglas Wilson and curricula like Memoria Press (rooted in the American Protestant tradition) popularized this framework among conservative homeschoolers and schools. Curricula offered by schools like Hillsdale College advertise themselves as “An American Classical Education” – an education indeed which glosses overly nearly 1,000 years of rich intellectual history wherein the Catholic Church received, refined, and perfected the true curriculum of the classical liberal arts.11 The Classical Liberal Arts Academy notes: “the problem with education will not be solved within a Protestant framework. The Protestant Reformation is itself a large part of the problem that led to the corruption of classical education.”12
These programs frequently retain the modern age/grade level school structure, reduce the Trivium to memorization, debate, and self-expression, remove true dialectical reasoning and replace it with “Socratic” classroom discussions, and introduce “Great Books” without the authoritative philosophical and theological framework proper to Catholic tradition (e.g., Aristotle as master of reasoning and St. Augustine or St. Thomas as Doctors of the Church). They tend to emphasize Protestant moral intellectualism or cultural preservation rather than the Thomistic integration of reason, grace, and doctrine ordered to union with God and the perfection of the intellect in truth and the will in goodness.
What happens when these methods are adopted or adapted by Catholics? Unfortunately, they import a Protestant framework rather than restoring the substance of classical Catholic education—the seven liberal arts studied for mastery, the Scholastic method, and Theology as queen of the sciences. The result is an imitation using classical terminology, not the reality enjoyed by the wise men and saints of the Catholic tradition.
Therefore, while such charter programs present some elements which are proper to classical schools, they do not truly meet the full criteria of a classical education.
Reply to Objection 5. This objection is unwarranted since American public charter schools, being institutions of public education funded by taxes levied upon the whole community, ought properly to emerge from and serve a pluralistic community seeking common civic ends, rather than arising from or being shaped by any partisan political party or specific religious denomination. This principle is embodied in the legal requirements governing charter authorization: to advance for consideration, petitioners must secure a certain number of signatures demonstrating support from the community. Yet, the charter itself must remain non-sectarian in its programs, admission policies, operations, employment practices, etc; it must be open to all students without religious discrimination; and it must be accountable to public authorities for advancing broadly shared educational goals rather than any private religious mission. This does not seem fitting for a Catholic community seeking educational solutions for its own families.
- See Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. ___ (2022); Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U.S. ___ (2020); EdChoice, The ABCs of School Choice (2026 ed.), https://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/The-ABCs-of-School-Choice-2026-WEB.pdf ; Ballotpedia, “School choice in the United States,” https://ballotpedia.org/School_choice_in_the_United_States (updated through 2026). ↩︎
- Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri (On the Christian Education of Youth), December 31, 1929, §80. http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121929_divini-illius-magistri.html ↩︎
- John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900/1915 edition). See also the Mead Project archive: https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1907/Dewey_1907a.html ↩︎
- William C. Michael, “The Definition of ‘Classical Education’,” Classical Liberal Arts Academy, March 22, 2026, https://classicalliberalarts.com/blog/the-definition-of-classical-education/ . See also “Truth and Goodness: The Real Ends of Education,” December 13, 2025, https://classicalliberalarts.com/blog/truth-and-goodness-the-real-ends-of-education/ . ↩︎
- See Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, 605 U.S. ___ (2025) (per curiam) (affirming by an equally divided Court the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling that a religious charter school violates the Establishment Clause because charter schools are public schools); St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond (consolidated). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-394_9p6b.pdf The Oklahoma Supreme Court held in 2024 that chartering and funding a pervasively religious public charter school contravenes both state law and the federal Constitution.
↩︎ - National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Digest of Education Statistics, latest tables on public elementary and secondary school current expenditures per pupil. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
↩︎ - William C. Michael, “The Definition of ‘Classical Education’,” Classical Liberal Arts Academy, March 22, 2026. https://classicalliberalarts.com/blog/the-definition-of-classical-education/ ↩︎
- https://classicalliberalarts.com/about/ The Classical Liberal Arts Academy is accredited by Cognia. ↩︎
- John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900/1915 edition). See also the Mead Project archive: https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1907/Dewey_1907a.html ↩︎
- William C. Michael, “Against Dorothy Sayers,” Classical Liberal Arts Academy, 2009. https://classicalliberalarts.com/blog/against-dorothy-sayers-2009/ ↩︎
- Consider some of the following absences: most of the Seven Liberal Arts as arts: Classical Arithmetic, the full corpus of Aristotle’s Organon, Classical Geometry, Classical Music (Boethius’ De Institutione Musica), Classical Astronomy, medieval commentaries on the Aristotle, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Albert the Great treatise on Logic, St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Classical Greek and Hebrew, Scholasticism and Catholic Theology, the history of the Medieval World as the integration of Reason and Faith. ↩︎
- William C. Michael, “XIV. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy,” https://classicalliberalarts.com/classical-catholic-education/xiv-the-classical-liberal-arts-academy/ ↩︎
