As a new academic year begins, Santa Clara College on Terceira and São Francisco Xavier College in Ponta Delgada are confronting a question larger than curriculum: how to educate children for a society that is more diverse, more digital and often more hurried, while preserving the human and Christian values that have long defined their educational missions.
A school teaches long before the lesson begins. It teaches in the way a child is welcomed, in how difference is received, in whether silence still has a place, and in whether knowledge is connected to responsibility for others. That broader understanding of education is guiding two Catholic schools in the Azores as they begin the 2026–2027 academic year: Santa Clara College on Terceira, with 383 students, and São Francisco Xavier College in Ponta Delgada, with approximately 300. From nursery through the second cycle, both institutions seek to combine academic learning with human formation while confronting new realities ranging from multiculturalism and digital life to financial sustainability and changing family relationships.
At Santa Clara, directed by the Franciscan Hospitaller Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, this year’s theme—“Azores, Small Islands, Great Values”—turns the archipelago itself into a classroom. Sister Helena Godinho wants students to discover Azorean history, culture and traditions while understanding the values that allow nine distinct islands to constitute one community. That metaphor has particular relevance inside an increasingly diverse school. Santa Clara welcomes children from different national backgrounds, including Brazilian and Chinese students and, last year, Iranian students. Enrollment, however, is only the beginning of integration. “We accept everyone and try to integrate them,” Godinho says, but children must also learn that difference is not something to fear. Increasingly, she observes, schools must deliberately cultivate acceptance from an early age.
In Ponta Delgada, São Francisco Xavier, operated by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny, has chosen another phrase for its two-year educational journey: “Courage to dream and faith to act.” For director Sister Domingas Lisboa, dreaming is insufficient without the confidence and courage to transform aspiration into action. The school seeks to form the whole person—academically, humanly and spiritually—and one of its most striking concerns is something increasingly scarce in childhood: interiority. “Nowadays, silence is difficult; stopping is difficult,” she says. In a culture of screens, speed and permanent stimulation, teaching a child to pause, reflect and look inward becomes an educational act in itself.
Both schools are also attempting to move education beyond classroom walls. Santa Clara will use Azorean history, Holy Spirit traditions, religion and citizenship as lived experiences, including activities involving families. São Francisco Xavier is developing projects in health, environmental responsibility, reading, sports, road safety, financial literacy, migration and multiculturalism. Solar panels are planned as part of its sustainability efforts, because, as Domingas Lisboa emphasizes, environmental education should not remain an abstraction taught in a classroom: it must become visible in choices and behavior. At the same time, reading initiatives seek to return children to books in an age increasingly dominated by screens, while activities from ballet and karate to tennis and basketball create spaces in which children can discover abilities they may not yet know they possess.
Yet perhaps the most important educational partnership remains the oldest one: the relationship between school and family. São Francisco Xavier wants to strengthen that connection through “dialogue, collaboration and trust,” including conversations with parents about parenting and children’s relationship with screens. At Santa Clara, Godinho describes the ideal school as a kind of second home—a place where children learn but also feel happy, secure and wanted. Values, she argues, cannot be confined to religion or citizenship classes. “In teaching mathematics or Portuguese, we have to transmit values. One is not separate from the other.”
Neither institution is insulated from practical difficulties. Santa Clara faces challenges recruiting professionals who identify with its educational mission, while rising costs and financial pressures on families complicate its work. São Francisco Xavier also faces financial concerns and the need to increase enrollment. With 133 years of institutional presence in the Azores, its director sees the sustainability of Catholic education as a question extending beyond the survival of an individual school to the future of a longstanding educational tradition in the archipelago.
Ultimately, however, the two schools arrive at remarkably similar definitions of education. Academic achievement matters, but so do autonomy, citizenship, responsibility, relationships and the capacity to recognize another person’s dignity. And beneath all those ambitions lies something even more elementary. Sister Helena’s message to parents is simply to spend time with their children, allowing them to grow close to those who love them. Children, she says, need to feel “safe” and “loved.”
Perhaps that is the most demanding lesson facing schools in a changing Azores. Education must prepare children to enter a world of technology, migration, cultural difference and uncertainty. But preparing them for that world means more than teaching them how to compete within it. It means teaching them how to inhabit it with others—and giving them enough knowledge to understand difference, enough interior strength to resist the noise, and enough humanity to recognize that no education is complete until the person beside us also has a place.
Based on a story from Igreja Açores, the photos are also from Igreja Açores.