Faith-based
A school that shares, and teaches, your family's beliefs.
Education inside an explicit religious frame, where the worldview is not confined to a lesson but runs through the day, the year and the community. For families who hold a faith this resolves something no other option does: the school is not neutral about what matters, and is not neutral in the same direction as the household. The cohort is usually more homogeneous, which is both the attraction and the cost.
Not what it promises
Every approach here works for the families it suits; the useful question is what it costs to run.
- Accepting a narrower range of families than your area actually contains
- Clarity about what happens if your own beliefs shift, or your child's do
- Involvement in a community, which is usually part of the arrangement rather than optional
Where it stands
Every position with the source it was read from, and the pale band is how much internal variation the approach genuinely tolerates. A wide band is not vagueness — it means the texts in this family really do disagree with each other about that axis.
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Well-Trained Mind
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
The highest position in the instrument on whether a school should hold a worldview, and the point of the row.
Source: Cultural Literacy
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
Source: The Public School Advantage
What to read
The Public School Advantage — Christopher and Sarah Lubienski
Includes Catholic-school outcomes, which are the best-studied case and less exceptional than assumed.
Cultural Literacy — E. D. Hirsch
Not about faith, and the clearest statement of why any school's canon is a choice about values.
Compared with
Sources for this row
The Public School Advantage
Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, University of Chicago Press, 2013. Finds that the measured advantage of private and selective schools largely disappears once intake is controlled for. The single most useful source in this instrument and the least quoted.
The Well-Trained Mind
Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise, Norton, 4th ed. 2016. The standard modern statement of classical education: the trivium, a fixed sequence, and memorisation before analysis.
Cultural Literacy
E. D. Hirsch, Houghton Mifflin, 1987. The argument for a shared body of knowledge that the classical and knowledge-rich rows sit on, and the origin of Core Knowledge.