Principal's Welcome
St John Henry Newman College came into existence as a result of asking an important but often neglected question: "What is the purpose of education?"
Current approaches to education focus on good grades or job-preparedness, and while these are good things, they are not the ultimate end. We believe the purpose is the same that it has always been: to cultivate wisdom and virtue.
This is why we are an independent Catholic school that teaches a classical curriculum in the Liberal Arts. This is the tradition and heritage of Catholicism, and we love operating within this beautiful, human, and life-giving approach to teaching and learning.
Cultivating wisdom and virtue requires introducing students to reality. St Augustine defined virtue as
ordo amoris, which means responding to things with ordinate affection. In order to love everything correctly, that is, in the right way, at the right time, and in the right amounts, students need first to develop the capacity to see reality, then to attend to it properly, then to understand it fully.
Once we see, attend, and understand reality, education moves on to teaching the relationships between different aspects of reality. We believe, with both the Church and our blessed patron St John Henry Newman, that reality is ordered and harmonious.
Teaching this order and harmony takes the student
from knowledge to wisdom. It communicates the beauty of creation, the logic of the truth, and the value of the good.
In short, aligning our understanding and actions with reality, rather than fighting against it, is the source of true happiness, as it can only be found in submitting to our Creator.
This is the centre of true education. Its constituent pieces are found in grammar and mathematics lessons, in conjugating Latin verbs, in learning how to sing, in training our physical bodies and appetites, and in memorising historical stories and geographical facts. These tiny pieces of reality add up each day and become integrated, ordered, and harmonised together to reveal true reality to students and help them to engage with it with wisdom and virtue. In the words of St John Henry Newman:
That perfection of the Intellect, which is the result of Education… is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things...
This is what we aspire to at Newman College. This is education. Good grades and job-preparedness cannot help but naturally emerge from this. They are not our purpose, but they are a result. They’re a good thing, but not the best thing. The best thing is Christ Himself.
Dr Kenneth Crowther
Founding Principal of St John Henry Newman College
Enrolments are open
