Queen of Peace Catholic Parish School

Queen of Peace Catholic School was founded in 1912, when our parish was named Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. The Benedictine Sisters from The St. Scholastica Priory were invited to teach in the school from its very beginning. The Great Cloquet Fire of 1918 destroyed the school along with the church, the rectory, and the convent. However, after the fire, Catholic school was so important to our families that the school building was rebuilt before anything else, and our classes continued, uninterrupted, in make-shift accommodations all through construction. Our new school building was completed within a year of the tragic fire that destroyed the entire city. The school hall served as the church for the congregation until 1926 when the beautiful church, which stands today, was completed.  

Catholic Mission, Identity, and Culture

As a Catholic school, we are conscious and confident heirs to a 2,500-plus year-old multi-cultural education tradition. Today, Catholic education remains faithful to the same principles of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that lie behind such diverse historical phenomena as the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Gothic Cathedrals, the Italian Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution. The unifying action behind all these things is man’s authentic quest to know and love God: through the life of the community God has founded, through the creation God has made, and through the desires God has placed in each soul.Our great educational heritage is not the same as the ultimately experimental education models that one finds in most schools today, where the hand of God is ignored or denied. Based in true openness of mind and heart, the schools of our tradition are better, for the plain reason that they acknowledge and are built upon better foundations.Our teaching philosophy at Queen of Peace is inspired by the first three liberal arts: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The liberal arts were identified within the Catholic tradition centuries ago, for being those arts that prepare a person to live a free and accomplished life. Together, the first three liberal arts are called the Trivium.The common practice of classical programs like ours is to view the arts of the Trivium as three-stages, like levels, by which students can ascend to mastery of any subject area. Take grammar to broadly mean building block knowledge; take logic to broadly mean knowledge of proper relationships, functions, and contexts; take rhetoric to broadly mean the masterful direction of these two prior arts for increasingly useful and personal purposes. It is easy to see how the skills required for each of these successive arts correspond to the natural skills that children develop as they mature. Teaching with a grammatical emphasis actually serves students’ natural inclinations in grades 1-4, when they are at an age of collecting names and ideas and compiling foundational understandings. Teaching with a logical emphasis actually serves students’ developing inclinations in grades 5-8, when they are becoming capable of deeper understandings, but need support identifying and navigating the virtues and justice of things. We do not teach high school at Queen of Peace, of course, but we prepare students for experiences in grades 9-12 that will emphasize the art of applied subject-area knowledge in increasingly masterful and dignified ways.

Our school exists to spread the Gospel in our area, and beyond, by transmitting the cultural identity, principles, teachings, and traditions of the Catholic Church.  We expect all students in our school to participate actively in all religious activities and services.Special efforts are made to teach the liturgical seasons and feasts of the Catholic Church, especially All Saints’, Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi. Our patronal feast is the Queenship of Mary on August 22nd.