English Department
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“…A selfless desire for a commitment to calling, a sense that honor is far more valuable than life—these are aspects of the soul that must be awakened by a vision of the high and the noble. And herein lies one of the great values of studying the classics: our poetic heritage gives imperishable form to
the heroic aspiration.”-Dr. Louise Cowan
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Our Mission
The mission of Frassati Catholic High School’s English Department is twofold: 1) for students to achieve excellence in writing, interpretive, and critical language skills and 2) for students to achieve a certain excellence of soul, by learning to integrate the knowledge to be gained from great literature not only into their other courses but into their own lives.
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While distinct from philosophy and science, literature as an academic discipline is comparable to both in its breadth and depth of imparting knowledge. As the ancient Roman writer Cicero pointed out, “nothing is sweeter and more useful than the study of literature” because of its power to illuminate the beauty of the truth about the human person.
Thus, the English curriculum seeks to cultivate the students’ ability to understand, appreciate, and respond to the great works of our literary tradition. Students search out the wisdom of the poets and refine their judgment by taking part in seminar discussions focused on the chief works of major authors.
Students are encouraged to learn what the best of the writers understand about human nature and the human experience throughout the ages. In doing so, they also follow in the footsteps of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who so loved Dante’s great epic The Divine Comedy that he committed large passages to memory and would spontaneously recite them for his friends.
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The course sequence parallels the Ethics and Culture department courses.
The freshman English course is organized thematically around the question of the human person’s search for identity, thus dovetailing with the Ethics and Culture course, The Human Person. In the sophomore English course, the literature explores the question of man’s search for happiness, complementing the Ethics and Culture course, Principles of Ethics: The Search for Happiness.
The study of logic, rhetoric, and analytical writing in the junior and senior courses also helps students as they address the more complex issues in Bioethics and in their senior writing project.
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