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Ohio has become a perfect microcosm of what us education reformers have been witnessing across the nation: where there is leftism trying to capture the hearts and minds of students, there is also a counterculture movement attempting to take students in a better direction.
Nathaniel Urban exposed that the Ohio Healthy Youth Environment Survey (OHYES!), a multi-NGO initiative, is sneaking gender ideology in school districts across the state. (Citizens have grown weary of NGOs since Trump’s DOGE team exposed USAID as a mixed bag of captured interests detrimental to U.S. foreign policy.) Backed by groups like the Drug Free Action Alliance and the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation, OHYES! surveys probe students in grades 7-12 about gender identity, sexual habits, and drug use before sex—questions Northeast Ohio parents have slammed as “inappropriate” and “predatory.”
But not all is doom and gloom in Ohio.
In Steubenville, the College of Saint Joseph the Worker stands as a countercultural bulwark, shunning leftist ideology for a blend of Catholic Studies and hands-on trade training in carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, and electrical work. This Catholic trade school exalts “skilled and dignified labor”—what we at the National Association of Scholars would call a vocation—as a path to virtue and debt-free living, defying the academy’s drift toward indoctrination and debt-slavery. I’m not just gripped by this institution because I am a former Ohioan, but also because of its defiance of society’s disdain for manual work, a chord that resonates as I trace education’s faltering link to real-world needs. (Just for starters, read “Do Degrees and Credentials Actually Prove Competence at Work?” and “Degrees Have Value—But Employers Shouldn’t Require Them.”)
For ages, the college notes, elites have scoffed at labor—Roman consul Cicero branded trades “vulgar.” But Christianity flipped the script. Pope Saint John Paul II, in Laborem exercens, reminded us that Jesus, “while being God,” toiled as a carpenter, making labor the “archetype of humanity.”
[RELATED: The Higher Ed Swamp Is Being Drained—But It’s Nowhere Near Empty]
The college embraces this, spurning America’s obsession with four-year degrees. Minding the Campus has long corroborated that four year degrees have lost their value: universities, bewitched by “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” peddle propaganda over wisdom; and their vaunted ROIs flop, leaving grads jobless and debt-soaked. Trades, meanwhile, have begun to shine.
In their first year, students explore the building trades via the “Anatomy of a House” program, learning site layout, concrete foundations, framing, wiring, plumbing, and finish to choose a trade—carpentry, HVAC, electrical, or plumbing—by year two. Certified by the NCCER and OSHA 10, students will have on-the-job training and have accrued journeyman hours under master craftsmen by the time they graduate. Grounded in tangible labor and a Catholic worldview, students, I suspect, are inoculated against leftist mirages, like claims that men can become women.
What’s happening in Ohio, however, is but a snapshot of a national showdown between leftist dogma and those who dare resist.
The left’s overreach—OHYES! probing 7th graders with sexual questions, pro-Hamas agitators disrupting Columbia University—sparks alarm, but it also ignites a countercultural fire. In Ohio, the College of Saint Joseph the Worker shines as that countercultural beacon. For America at large, Hillsdale College and the University of Austin play that role.
Will our youth be seduced by propaganda or steeled by purpose? I don’t know; probably the former, mostly. But Saint Joseph the Worker wagers on the latter, proving that from leftist chaos, some students can rise to craft homes, communities, and a culture tethered to Christ’s carpentry, not culture wars.
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Image: “Roman missal – St. Joseph Worker” by Royal Griffin on Flickr
