Medellin, Colombia is a city of over four million nestled in the breathtaking Aburra Valley, at an elevation of nearly one mile. Just twenty minutes outside the city limits, and another 1000 meters up, at the edge of the high-altitude rainforest that still blankets much of the rolling mountaintops overlooking Medellin, sits the campus of the Colegio Sagrado Corazon. The school is spread across many acres. A 70–meter footbridge spans the heavily forested ravine that divides the campus in two. The bridge is a marvel in itself, but halfway across, there is a stretch when both ends are out of sight, and the sounds of the rainforest—birds mostly, coupled with distant wind and rain—take over. For a moment the comforting veil of civilization is drawn back and the soul is awakened to a world untamed, gloriously wild, dangerous and majestic. Keep walking, and the safety of civilization comes back into view. Having left the award-winning architecture of the new lower school building, you reach the original campus: a series of terraced courtyards framed by classrooms that open to the overflow of lush foliage.
Sagrado Corazon (SC) had connected with Arcadia last year for support in moving their PreK-12 school to a classical Catholic liberal arts program. Our six-month working engagement, beginning in mid-January, had therefore landed me in the Southern Hemisphere and gotten me a hundred feet across that bridge by mid-February. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Sagrado Corazon was already one of the most highly regarded schools serving this part of Colombia. They have a single-track PK through 12 program that is taught in full English immersion from grades K through 8. The school’s graduates have excelled in all fields—engineering, the liberal arts, business, communications, and so on—both at home and abroad. Many SC students have been accepted into Ivy League schools and other top-tier universities in America. But the faculty would say that their greatest strength, the heart of their school, is in the relationships they form with their students, and the relationships their students form with God and one another. This is a place where students are known, loved, and formed in faith.
So why mess with a good thing? Mr. Mauricio Vega, chair of the science department and faculty professional development, and Academic Coordinator Ana María Correa González, have been leading the charge to continually improve both faculty training and the curriculum. Mauricio’s studies in the Catholic intellectual tradition as a graduate student at the University of Dallas shaped his educational vision. As he explained to me, SC has no desire to change who they are as a community: rather, they want to become the richest, fullest, most complete version of the faithful Catholic community they already are. He believes that to do that, “We must elevate our curriculum through a deeper commitment to the arts of the trivium and quadrivium, the liberal arts that have shaped Catholic education for the better part of two millennia.” To be clear, our task was not to build an American curriculum for a school in Columbia. It was to build a Catholic classical curriculum in the Columbian tradition, one that traced the great conversation as it unfolded from antiquity to present day Columbia, using their literature, their poetry, and their history.
We began our journey by getting to know Sagrado Corazon, its leaders and faculty, its history, its daily schedule, philosophical and theological convictions, its curriculum, pedagogy, and purpose. The work was slow going. My week-long visit in February allowed me to observe every aspect of their academic program (it’s a rough life, but someone had to!). Once we sketched out the aim and requirements of the build, creation began with agreeing on the time allocations per subject (Will science need a block schedule? Will logic be one semester or two?) then on to curriculum design principles (Will literature and history focus on the same time period each year?). Our progress was not always linear. Finally we aligned on theological, philosophical, and teleological principles within each discipline (How best to embody the personalism that inspires their pedagogy?). Most of the time this meant arriving at an appreciation for the academy’s already well-elucidated position, but at times there was a need for deep collaboration and reflection. Once this arduous spadework was completed, compiling the text selections was relatively straightforward for the team.
Our team on this engagement was composed of three specialists: two veteran classical academic leaders turned Arcadia consultants, Mrs. Courtney Gunn and Mrs. Brittany Trevino, and Dr. Erik Ellis, assistant professor of Education and Classical Learning at the University of Dallas. Dr. Ellis’s expertise in classical education and the South American academic landscape were instrumental in tailoring the upper school curriculum to both the vision and the needs of Sagrado Corazon.
Classical education’s detractors have made much hay out of its alleged “rigidity” and oppressive Eurocentric power structures. This couldn’t be further from the truth: the liberal arts are those that make one free. An engaged, appreciative boots-on-the-ground cultural interchange with the gifted faculty of Sagrado Corazon drove that home. We weren’t there to transplant an American curriculum into a Colombian context. We were there to tend the unique human virtue already growing in Colombian soil. (Oh, and if you’re looking for cookie-cutter kids rigidly conformed to the zeitgeist, well, let’s just say you wouldn’t start your search at a thriving classical school.)
When the project is complete, SC will have a complete list of every ISBN for every course at every grade level, an implementation guide for phasing in the changes, a PK–12 scope and sequence, a two year professional development plan for faculty, and a curricular rationale document to make sure they have a record of why each choice was made. At this moment, Arcadia only has the last two documents to deliver, and the team at SC already has the first round of faculty trainings underway. It has been an honor and a joy to come alongside the SC team and build something beautiful for them that fulfilled their vision. Their passion and commitment to God and their students have inspired our team, and we look forward to following their progress for years to come.
There I am on the bridge. In the west, the green and gold central range of the Andes arches its back toward the sky. I hear that there above the cloud forests, in a treeless mountaintop preserve called the Paramo del Sol, plants called frailejones flourish that can be found in no other ecosystem. With eyes squinted, the brown and gold paramo could be mistaken for a cactus-covered hill in Arizona. But the frailejones that grow there are no cacti. These remarkable plants, instead of storing water away, gather it from passing clouds and release it through their roots into the soil. At their roots begin the streams which feed the rivers that nourish the jungles and valleys of all this lush land of Colombia.