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Reports: For those seeking the Re-Enchantment of Education

By 25 August 2018July 15th, 2019All Posts

New Resources from Second Spring

By Teresa Caldecott Cialini

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Things may have seemed quiet at Second Spring this year with our Summer School on hiatus (10 years running: we needed a break!), but in fact a lot has been happening behind the scenes.

Today we launched the long-promised Second Spring Education Forum for exploring what Stratford Caldecott called “The Re-Enchantment of Education”. This virtual community space is for teachers, academics, parents, homeschoolers, and anyone interested in the revival of Classical Education and the Liberal Arts, but it is particularly inspired by the books, articles, and blog of the late Stratford Caldecott on the Trivium and Quadrivium. The forum was created to share news and resources, as well as encouraging discussion and collaboration. We aim to particularly serve the needs of the United Kingdom, where this movement is only just beginning to get off the ground, but we welcome participants from other countries.

“We need a new educational movement. As individuals and as communities we need to re-educate ourselves – to unlearn much of what we have been taught and to begin to learn again in a new way. The purpose would not be to cover every specialized field of knowledge, but to develop a sense of the whole, of the interconnectedness of all things, and their intrinsic interest and value – it would be an education in wonder.”
—Stratford Caldecott, in an unfinished essay

After Stratford Caldecott, my father, wrote Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education, people from all over the place began to contact him, wanting him to discuss and expand on his ideas. Soon he was urged to write the companion volume, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, with an advance from kind supporters, and even more people began to get in contact with him. He knew he had limited energy and time left, and he desperately wanted to connect these fans to each other, particularly those in far-flung areas of the U.K. who were so desperate for fresh ideas about Education and like-minded people they could collaborate with.

So he created a blog, and posted as much of his own thoughts as he could, and an email newsletter as an attempt to keep the budding community informed of each other’s activities…and an area of the old discussion boards at secondspring.co.uk dedicated to Education.

Sadly, he lost his battle to cancer in 2014, and though his books have continued to inspire people all over the world, there was so much more he wanted to do. “Education”, he told me, “is the next great battlefield for so much that we love and have fought for” through the Centre for Faith & Culture and Second Spring.

My dream for the Second Spring Education Forum, and the reason we’ve redesigned our website with this integrated area, is that it can provide a virtual space for people to connect, share, and support one another in their quest for “the Re-Enchantment of Education”—an Education of Wonder.

A New Book

We’re also excited to announce a new book on Catholic education in the Second Spring Imprint at Angelico Press:

Out of the Classroom and into the World: How to Transform Catholic Education, by Roy Peachey (with a Foreword by Michael Hanby)

Catholic education can transform our children, and we can transform Catholic education: that is the foundational message of this book. Drawing inspiration from the work of Stratford Caldecott, Pope Benedict XVI, and many others, Out of the Classroom and into the World delivers a rallying cry for parents, teachers, and home educators, offering a probing analysis of contemporary Catholic education and making practical, actionable suggestions for real and lasting change.

“What he writes is both wise and provocative…Do read it.”—Francis Phillips