A school for the Lord's service

The "Rule of St. Benedict" opens with a single word: listen.

"Listen carefully, my son, to the master's instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart." It is a strange way to begin a rule for a community, and exactly right, because St. Benedict understood that a community is always forming the people in it, whether anyone intends it or not.

A school is the same. It forms students by its schedule, its habits and its unspoken assumptions about what matters, and most of that formation happens by drift. The task is to make it happen on purpose.

That task is more urgent than it was five years ago, because now the work itself can be handed off. A machine will read the book, draft the essay and solve the problem, and the offer looks like help. But when the labor of learning is offloaded, the student is still being formed, only now toward the habit of not laboring.

St. Benedict names the problem a few lines into his Rule: "The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience." Drift through sloth; return through labor. He could have been describing a school in 2026.

St. Benedict's answer was a place, and he called it a school. "Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord's service," he writes, and his model is plain enough to borrow: a written rule held in common, a stable community rooted in one place, a daily rhythm of prayer and work and persons rather than output as the product.

He promises "nothing harsh, nothing burdensome," while admitting that the way "is bound to be narrow at the outset."

This year one school has set out to follow that model. Trinity Academy South Bend, a classical Christian school, received a DELTA Rapid Response Grant from Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, supported by Lilly Endowment.

Prompted by how quickly AI is outpacing institutions, the program asked grantees to try something concrete and document it for others. Under the direction of head of school John Lee, Trinity took up two efforts after Benedict's model: Clarify the school's ends, and invest in the people who make its culture.

This work did not start from scratch. One of the school's foundational documents, "A Culture of Learning," was written to defend the conditions of learning against distraction. It insists that "education unfolds among actual people in an actual place," that learning "is not simply the transfer of information but the formation of persons," and that the school's low-technology commitment is "not a retreat from the modern world, but a principled commitment to the conditions under which real learning takes place." Those claims held before automation. They hold harder now.

The first effort was to write the ends down. A team of teachers spent a weekend together, the first day talking through what each discipline is for, the second drafting. The result is three short papers: one on the humanities, one on mathematics and the sciences and one on the fine arts.
Together they explain why every student studies calculus, physics, programming and four years of Latin while also singing in a choir, acting in plays and making art, and why high school students spend two hours a day in a seminar called Humane Letters. The papers resist reducing learning to measurable outputs. They say what kind of person the curriculum is forming.

The second effort was a retreat, in the old sense of the word: a stepping back for the sake of returning. In August the whole faculty and staff spent two days off campus in prayer, study and conversation. All had read Benedict's Rule over the summer, along with a chapter of Rowan Williams's "The Way of St Benedict."

Each educator began writing a personal rule for his or her own vocation, on the premise that teachers cannot form students in virtues they do not themselves possess. Four themes carried the conversation. "Stability" is the discipline of abiding with these people in this place. "Humility" is honesty about oneself, and "obedience" begins, as the Rule does, with listening. "Currency," a word Williams borrows from Donald Nicholl, names the fact that a community gets back whatever it puts into circulation, grievance or goodness.

Several weeks into the school year, the head of school asked a teacher to take on a demanding new job: leading the school through its report for an upcoming accreditation review. The teacher prayed before he answered. When he came back, he said yes, and he said why. He had been thinking about the humility and obedience he had studied with his colleagues that summer, and he would take the work on as a mission. Listen first, then act, just as the Prologue asks.

What Benedict reveals is that an intentional culture needs clear ends and formed culture-makers. The Rule points where a school should. "The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings," Benedict writes, and "as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God's commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love." That is what a school is for, and the machines have only made it plainer.