You can see it on their faces. So many of today’s young people are looking for something…but they can’t quite put their finger on what. Is it purpose? Peace? Happiness? It’s all of these—and more.

What if there were a place where young people could discover who they are and what they should live for? Where they could investigate the world around them and consider not just what they observe but also why it is so? Where they could find their place in the world—and confidently take it? And what if they could do all this in an atmosphere of true joy and wonder?

Our Catholic faith informs everything we do. God made man rational, and when we wonder at the order, the complexity, and the puzzling mystery of his handiwork in all things, we are really wondering at him. What moves us to wonder? It’s the encounter with the good, the true, and the beautiful, which we find in a special way in a classical curriculum.

In a fast-paced world, in which scrolling and screens can encourage anxious passivity, our classical curriculum helps students train their minds to active response. By engaging with the world’s great thinkers, students discover the order of things in the world, as well as the meaning and value of human life. Through the incorporation of the Socratic method of arriving at the truth by asking questions, students discover these things together in constructive dialogue. This means that their education can involve an active receptivity, not merely a passive acquiescence.

When we encounter what is good, true, and beautiful, we experience joy. We are called out of the narrowness of our own consciousness to an experience of something greater than ourselves—and, as great as his created effects are, there is nothing greater than the Creator himself. Students come to know how deeply God loves them, and they learn that this love is the source of boundless happiness. What a healing balm in the world today, when so many young people are in such need of joy!