Navy Veteran Who Started Private School: ‘I Want My Kids to Go to Heaven’
Read Time: 2 Minutes 28 Seconds
A retired veteran Navy pilot is taking on a new battle these days—restoring faith in the classroom.
Frustrated by woke ideologies in America’s classrooms, Lt. Commander Ali Ghaffari wanted a better education system for his three daughters. He is striking back at the woke ideals in schools by launching a classical Catholic school—Divine Mercy Academy—in Maryland based on his faith and lessons he learned from his military training.
“We’re a military family and we have traveled throughout the country and have seen lots of schools,” Ghaffari told Fox News recently. “We settled in at the Naval Academy, which was my last tour. I put my kids in public schools and I thought they would be fine and do well there. Then, I realized, they were not getting what I had hoped for.”
Concerned that a secular education would confuse his children’s values, Ghaffari explored classical education, which came from the Greeks.
“For me, I want my kids to go to heaven.” Ghaffari says. “I love Jesus. I want my kids to be saints and to live lives of virtue. That wasn’t the path I thought they were trodding.
“My middle daughter was doing common core math and she was struggling. She would cry at the dinner table at night. I said, ‘we can’t do this.’ Then I heard about classical education. It was then that I began thinking about starting a school. I visited one and I was absolutely amazed at what I saw. The depth of the questions, the questions ‘why,’ and kids being able to go deeper and broader. I said, ‘That’s what I want for my kids.’
“Classical education comes from the Greeks, and the Greeks wanted to know, ‘what does a good life look like?’ How do we live our lives? And what they came up with is living lives of virtue and asking the big questions and living a life that is honorable. That life frees you to have many choices and do many things. Whereas a life that focuses on vocation, it kind of hems you in to one particular career and doesn’t give you the opportunity to do other things. Classical education focuses on training these kids to live in that virtue.”
Ghaffari says his children now have a different attitude about school and look forward to going each day.
“Our kids love their homework, they love going to school,” Ghaffari says. “They love studying and discussing big topics.”
“The education that our kids are getting in the public schools and sadly, even in some of our parochial schools, it is very secularized,” Ghaffari says. “And that agenda is very contrary to them going to heaven. It is very focused on the here and now, and it ignores the heaven and the eternal. We wanted to bring that back and put God back in the center where He belongs. We do that every day as part of our curriculum.
Ghaffari says enrollment continues to grow and encourages parents who want something different than what secular education is teaching their children to look into starting their own private school.
“You can do it and it’s well worth it,” he says.
For more information on Divine Mercy Academy, click here. {eoa}
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Shawn A. Akers is the online editor at Charisma Media.
