Introducing Your Trustees: Lisa Corley
When I graduated from college, I had a heart for inner city students and evangelization and began my teaching career in Title 1 public schools. I witnessed firsthand the dysfunction of the test-driven culture that is pervasive in modern education. When my husband, John and I had our four children, I became a stay-at-home mom, but I kept abreast of what was happening in education.
Our Catholic faith is central to our lives, so when our children approached school age, we knew we wanted more from their education than public schools provide. We naturally chose Catholic education as a starting point, as Catholic schools have a rich history of strong academics and faith formation. Unfortunately, Common Core and the emphasis on technology came about around the same time our kids entered school. Much to our dismay, our local diocese chose to adopt and adapt Common Core standards for the diocesan schools. Thus began my search to find an alternative to these modern educational trends in the diocese. While researching Common Core, I discovered something that intrigued and excited me. I realized what was missing from education when I was teaching, and from what I expected to find in Catholic schools. It had a name - classical education - and I knew immediately that was the education I wanted for our children.
I continued to educate myself about the classical model and prayed for seven years that God would use me in some capacity to transform and renew Catholic education. He answered my prayer when I was hired at Borromeo Academy in Gladstone, MO, to lead the transition to the classical model, and is continuing that good work in my new position at Christ the King School in Kansas City, KS. This is my final year in a three-year Masters level certification program for classical teaching, with the Circe Institute. I have found my vocation in spreading the news and philosophy of this most human way to educate a soul. I am also one of the founding members of Chesterton Academy of St. Philip Neri. Kansas City is becoming a leader in the revival of the Catholic liberal arts.
Our faculties for perceiving and recognizing beauty, goodness and truth must be honed so that we are not led astray by things which appeal only to our senses without illuminating our souls. We must help our children connect the knowing and the doing. Cultivating virtue is not abstract, it is intentional. The things we choose to read, listen to, do and talk about will lead us either toward Christ or away from Him. What we want for our children is not a life focused on pleasure and utility. Our desire for them is a lifetime of pursuing beauty, goodness and truth, which ultimately creates virtue and a belonging to Christ. We are always becoming; we are never finished. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “Being Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.”
Today, the great advances in technology have combined with our society’s ethos of relativism to form a world in desperate need of beauty, goodness and truth: in need of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is from Catholic liberal arts education that our children will acquire the tools to think well, write well, speak well, share the Good News, and become saints! Join the Chesterton Academy of St. Philip Neri in this all-important eternal endeavor!
-Lisa Corley