At Saint Mary Catholic Virtue School, our students begin to become the Saints, Geniuses, and Heroes they were created to be, right from the very start.  While each student embodies all three, our curricular stages (Pre-K, Elementary or K-5, and Middle School or 6-8), bring to the forefront one aspect at a time.  In Pre-K, becoming Saints–or, what the Educational Covenant calls the prophetic aspect of the educational event (p. 59)–enjoys its proper primacy.

When Our Lord said we must all become like little children if we mean to enter His Kingdom (Mt. 18:2-6) what was He talking about?  As He explained to Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea (Jn. 3:5), He meant receiving the Sacrament of Baptism, and living it out through the worthy reception of each Sacrament that follows, for each person.  But, is that all?  If it was, would education even be necessary?

When the Second Person of the Trinity took on flesh, even He “grew in wisdom and grace” (Lk. 2:52).  Each human being made in the image and likeness of God, in other words, has an innate capacity for wonder–that openness to realities beyond the self, and beyond the cosmos itself.  Wonder is the recognition that we come from God and are intended by Him to return to Him, like His own word which does not come back to Him void, but accomplishes all He sent it for. Lacking wonder at any age, we become closed off in what C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, terms “the dungeon of the self,” imploding like a dark star, a black hole. 

The Art of Living contradicts this reductionist tendency by orienting everything and everyone towards Mary Immaculate, the Stella Maris or “Star of the Sea.”  In Pre-K, the capacity for wonder is recognized and encouraged in and of itself, while also as the basis of all educational efforts which follow.  G. K. Chesterton once observed,  A Principled View, that “the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for wonder”--yet not, Deo gratias, here at Saint Mary Catholic Virtue School!