New Oxford Collegiate Academy: A Newman Vision for Ordinariate High School Education

Parents have a new opportunity to provide their high school students a faithful, Catholic education in the liberal arts and sciences rooted in the vision of St. John Henry Newman through the New Oxford Collegiate Academy launching in Fall 2021.

In this interview with the ACS, John Saladino, the Academy's executive director and Georgetown University philosophy professor, shares the vision and inspiration behind the New Oxford Collegiate Academy. The Academy aims to give families access to an Oxford-style tutorial education for their children using modern online tools and at-home learning, under the direction of excellent teachers.  

Saladino, a Catholic member of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, also shares his own journey of how the Anglican tradition helped draw him back into the full communion of the Catholic Church from Evangelicalism, and the ways in which New Oxford Collegiate Academy provides unique opportunities to advance the Ordinariate educational mission.  

Where did the idea for the New Oxford Collegiate Academy come from?
I have a good friend who, like me, is a convert to the Church. He's lives in California but does entrepreneurial work nationally, and, as a result, has his finger on the pulse of a variety of contemporary cultural trends in the United States. We often talk about the state of the Church, the world, and make predictions about the shape of the future. One evening, he asked me, "John, have you ever thought about starting school?" And I said, "Well, only for about 15 years!" He has four daughters and had been thinking seriously about where he would like to send them to high school. He didn’t like any of his options. My wife and I, too, had been thinking similar things.

So, in that conversation—and after talking with my wife and other trusted folks—an idea we had for some time began to take a more specific shape. We also had a sense that the contemporary educational landscape in the United States would change (for the worse) pretty quickly. We wanted to be particularly useful to the Ordinariate, given its current needs and national scope. We thought, “Wouldn't it be nice, especially with the greater contemporary need for mobility, for Catholics and especially Ordinariate families to have access to a rigorous, competitive, classical, liberal arts and science education that came alongside our families?  If we opt for a format that allows for a national reach, we can bring on board some of the best teachers that we can get our hands on.”  (For instance, science teachers that still work in industry, and have patents, but also just love teaching and already do work at the youth group level.)

As things evolved, we thought “Let’s stay away from ‘doing school’ the way America has always done it, and just go with the model that would be the best educational option for students and families in the contemporary situation.”  With a national scope, contemporary communication technology, and the right structure, we realized we could give Catholic families access to an Oxford or Cambridge style education—which was pioneered, in part, by St. John Henry Newman. So New Oxford Collegiate Academy was born.

So you taught at Oxford University, at Magdalen College where C.S. Lewis taught. How did that shape your ideas about education, and how it should be done in America?
I taught at Magdalen College School, as their Waynflete Academic in Philosophy. It’s an excellent school, and St. Thomas More is among its alumni. It is housed in the same College of the University of Oxford where C.S. Lewis taught and had the conversations with Tolkien that led to his conversion. It was a wonderful experience.

During my time there, I witnessed educational elements at work that were very surprising to me. By the time I'd come to Oxford, I had been teaching college for about seven years. As a Waynflete Academic, I mentored and taught high school students that were working at a very high level—clearly at or very close to a graduate level of work. It began to occur to me that high school students are capable of so much more than we think if they receive the right kind of support, through a more personalized approach. I even saw middle-schoolers who, from my perspective, were asking very close to graduate-level questions because they studied logic seriously, saw it as important, and received the right kind of general formation.

Then I read in St. John Henry Newman's Idea of the University that Oxford’s tutorial-based approach is really his ideal educational model. Tutorials are hour-long meetings with a professor, called a “tutor,” held once a week in each subject, where work done in advance is debated and discussed between student and professor. Oxford educates students this way the whole way through their programs. Assessment is only done at the end, similar to “board” exams. It moves education out of the “industrialized” classroom and to the personal context, with stunning results.

So how do you envision New Oxford Collegiate Academy can be at the service of Ordinariate parishes and communities in educating and forming their young people?
In as many ways as possible!  However, there are perhaps two ways we hope to be of particular service.

First, many families in the Ordinariate live in places with little or no access to faithfully Catholic, STEM-rigorous education for high school. We want to be a part of the solution for them, alongside the good work of their parishes.

Most of these families have come into the Church after periods of careful prayer and study and their unique kind of journey has given them insight into the landscape of contemporary culture; they notice that many high schools in their area do not share their values. Some schools share their values do but lack other elements that they would like to see in their children’s education. We share this perspective with them, and a central goal of the Academy is to help families form their children into young men and women who develop powerfully, holistically, stay faithful to Christ, and go on to actively shape and build Christian culture—rather than being shaped or distorted by contemporary secular culture.

Second, we want to involve Ordinariate priests as teachers, speakers and spiritual leaders in the Academy. We want lean into the fact that we are national in scope, seeing the unique elements of the Ordinariate parishes as a gift for whole in the world of faithful Catholic education.

Now what’s your own experience of the Ordinariate. How did you come to get involved?
I came into the Church the same year that Pope Emeritus Benedict issued Anglicanorum coetibus. My wife and I were living in Southern California at the time, and I was intrigued and praying for what would come of it all. After the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter came into being, I learned that Father Andrew Bartus [Ordinariate priest in California] was soon to come into full communion together with a group that became St. John Henry Newman Catholic Church in Irvine, CA. He and I went to the same Baptist youth group in Austin, Texas. The parish eventually ended up meeting for some time in the town next to ours. I would often make the trip up to Santa Ana to assist at Mass, at the parish’s first home in the Diocese of Orange. So we had the privilege of being around right of the beginning of things.

In terms of my particular journey home, I was taken out of the Catholic Church at a very young age and was raised as a southern Evangelical. I fell in love with the Anglican liturgy at a small Christian liberal arts college in South Carolina. The rector of a local Anglican parish would sometimes come to the college and host Morning Prayer. Before hearing the language of the Prayer Book, I was very “anti-liturgical.” However, as a theology and biblical languages double major, I was powerfully struck the first time I heard the language of Morning Prayer, "This is so full of Scripture!”  It felt like those who had crafted this language had drank deeply from the wells of Holy Scripture, and then poured it back to God—known and lived—in prayer. I was hooked. And I was Anglican for quite some time before coming into full communion in 2009.
So the Liturgy of the Ordinariate and the culture of the parishes is our home. My wife and I usually go to an Ordinary form Mass - and it's beautiful, it's good, there's nothing wrong with it -- but it's just not our [spiritual] language. Ordinariate parishes have a vibrancy and devotion that is seems to be exactly what parish life is meant to be. We’re excited to have one close enough to us one day!

So what makes New Oxford Collegiate Academy’s approach different from the other Catholic online high school education options available?
The central thing that makes us different is a personalized approach that simply cannot be matched by the classroom. There is a lot of discussion at the moment about in-person versus online education, and rightly so, but this leaves out an important conversation we need to have about the shape of instruction in general. Our best and brightest who have thought about education—among whom we have to count St. John Henry Newman—have things to say about it.

The Oxford-style tutorial, which is a meeting between the teacher and just two or three students, happens all the way through our curriculum, just as it does at Oxford. Socratic lectures are built in once a week, as well—which rounds things out for a truly Oxford-style education. In addition to both of these, we have access to a wonderful network of speakers, including college professors and faithful Catholics working in industry.

The feel of an Oxford-style education is the difference between being in an exercise class, hoping that you're doing it right, versus working with a personal trainer, who's right there with you.

I think another important element of New Oxford Collegiate Academy is this: although we are co-educational overall, we typically will have only single-sex tutorials and Socratic discussions. In our experience, keeping young men and young women separate for most of the teaching and learning frees students up to just enjoy learning the material, and keeps them protected from the added social pressures and distractions of co-educational environments.

You mentioned St. John Henry Newman – can you go more into how his vision for education is reflected in New Oxford Collegiate Academy?
I should mention at least two, although I hope there are a great many ways it reflects his vision.
First, a tutorial-style education is central to Newman’s educational philosophy. We see this in his plans for the Catholic University of Ireland. Newman was a pioneer of the current method Oxford tutorial teaching when he was a Fellow at Oriel College. So, in one sense, our core model at New Oxford Collegiate Academy’s is something that I think Newman would heartily endorse, a way of educating that he himself likely would choose were he to start a new high school in the contemporary context.

Second, we also share Newman’s vision of the goal of education: the development of the intellectual powers of the human person to enable a true, unified vision of the world through the use of reason. True education perfects the mind as exercise and diet do the body. This is why we think STEM and philosophy of science are equally as important. We must coach discernment of connections and underlying principles. The wonderful work of the late Fr. William Wallace, OP, undergirds the way the Academy approaches its courses in science and avoids scientism.

Can you share some of the courses your faculty are teaching students at New Oxford Collegiate Academy?
One particularly exciting subject we teach is Humane Letters, or “Greats.”  It is a series of courses that integrates philosophy, theology, history and English into a single discussion. We have a list of books that is similar to St. John’s College in Maryland, but with a more philosophical and Thomistic leaning. On the whole, we tend to favor Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas and the Doctors of the Church.

In mathematics and science courses, students work through Euclid’s Elements, Ptolemy’s Almagest and Newton’s Principia, keep observation journals, do experiments and dissections. Higher grades will learn the MATLAB programming language and read Thomistic works in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.

In each course, students are assigned reading, essays and/or problem sets to do before each subject’s weekly tutorial meeting. The conversation with the tutor centers around discussion of the work produced and how it relates to larger themes and ideas. The tutor examines each student’s work to coach careful observation, the making of proper distinctions, the discernment of fundamental principles at work, the tracing of the logic of ideas and the communication of results and ideas effectively. It’s about as far from the rote memorization of facts as one can get.

So how do you have this online learning approach avoid the pitfalls of “Zoom fatigue”?
The great thing about the tutorial method delivered by video conference is that most of the work is done offline. Students spend no more than two hours a day (or less!) in front of a screen. When meeting on Zoom in a more personalized context, tutorials can be fun and refreshing. They can make for a helpful rhythm of work and discussion.
Think of the last time you connected with friends or family on Skype and thought “Wow, it was good to see them!”  Good tutorials online capture that kind of feeling as a part of the experience—learning and work happens offline, and then it is discussed face-to-face, targeted, personalized ways.

Who is this kind of education for – is it for everyone?
Absolutely! And because tutorials are personalized, they are adaptable to a range of natural talents and inclinations. But, in general, it is for everyone who would like a historically proven, uniquely effective and individualized education for their children in a faithful Catholic context, supportive and inclusive of family involvement. It wouldn’t interest those who are seeking high school education only for job training, simply because we seek to go far beyond that.

When is the Academy launching?
We’re officially launching this Fall, but we’ll also be offering summer courses this year!

So what is the tuition like?
Yearly tuition comes in at a very affordable $7,250, with another $1250 for supplies and books. So, the total is well under half of what you typically would pay for private Catholic education in the United States, on average. We're able to do this, in part, because we don't have the same overhead of other schools. We're able to focus on the educational moment, facilitating effective tutorial relationships between excellent teachers and their students. We think that’s school at its best.

Also, we expect scholarship funds to increase as we grow!

Ultimately, where do you see New Oxford Collegiate Academy headed? What’s your vision down the road?
Our central hope is simply to serve our students, families and teachers well. But we also hope to be a resource to the larger community, sharing our experience and expertise.
In the future, we have an eye toward the Academy’s model serving as an effective blueprint for future physical campuses, whether independent or parochial. We would love to see Newman-inspired ways of incarnating Oxford tutorial-style education in our cities, neighborhoods and parishes. We would also love to see physical campuses as beautiful as Pope Emeritus Benedict has asked us to make them. Un-American, perhaps, but very Catholic!  St. John Henry Newman, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine and the Church’s Magisterium have already pointed out the way. We just have to put our hands to the plow!

Editor’s note: New Oxford Collegiate Academy is currently enrolling students in 9^th and 10^th grades, with limited spots in 11^th grade. Learn more about New Oxford Collegiate Academy here.

Peter Jesserer Smith is the Vice President of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, and a staff writer for EWTN’s National Catholic Register.