Contrary to widely held conceptions of Catholic schooling as “parochial,” in the 1890s the Dominican Sisters based in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, created and implemented progressive ideas of education in their grammar schools and academies in the United States. By the 1930s their curriculum in Corpus Christi School in New York City received national recognition. Sr. Joan Smith, OP, and Sister Mary Nona McGreal, OP, expanded the Dominicans’ child-centered philosophy in their curriculum for Guiding Growth in Christian Social Living, a pioneering project of the Catholic University’s Commission on American Citizenship. The Dominicans’ educational ideas, regarded as “a milestone in U.S. Catholic education,” influenced hundreds of thousands of school children who came of age before Vatican II.
Introduction to New Thinking, New Scholarship and New Research in Catholic Education: Responses to the Work of Professor Gerald Grace