It is worth beginning by undoing an impression that the existence of a school with seventeen hundred students naturally creates: that there must have been a plan.
It Was Not a Business Plan
There was none. There was no five-year plan, no market study, no business decision to enter the education sector. What there was instead was a sequence of things we did not ask for, some of which we did not understand at the time, and many prayers offered without the slightest idea of what would come from them.
We tell this not out of false modesty. We tell it because the story, as it actually happened, is the only honest explanation we have, and because those who work at the school today have the right to know where it came from.
2014: The Year Education Entered Our Lives
None of this began with education. It began with a shock.
In 2014, we attended an event about what was then being discussed under the name of gender ideology and its entry into Brazilian school curricula. We went out of concern as parents, not out of professional interest. We left with the realization that the issue was much larger than we had imagined and touched something prior to any public policy: the conception of the human person that a school communicates to children without explicitly saying that it is doing so.
In the months that followed, our study led us to readings we had never planned: the history of Brazilian pedagogy, the formation of schools of education, and the political philosophy that shaped them from the 1970s onward. It was a period of intense, disorderly reading—the kind that happens when someone discovers they do not actually understand something they had assumed was obvious.
Two influences were decisive at that moment, and it is only fair to name them.
The first was Prof. Felipe Nery, an educator and former director of Colégio São Bento in São Paulo, who at the time traveled throughout the country speaking about education to audiences of parents. Listening to him made the issue finally click for us: the problem was not simply inappropriate content in a textbook. The problem was anthropology—the answer a school gives, beneath everything else, to the question of what a human person is. And if the problem was there, then no curricular adjustment alone would solve it.
The second was our contact with the work of Prof. Olavo de Carvalho, whose diagnosis of Brazilian intellectual life gave us, at the time, the vocabulary to understand what we were seeing.
Why Education and Not Politics
It was then that we made the decision that defined everything that came afterward, and it came from a simple line of reasoning.
The environment in which we moved during those years was intensely political, and many good people were doing containment work: denouncing, resisting, preventing. Necessary work. But we realized that it was structurally defensive work—a counterattack. One was always reacting to what the other side proposed, therefore always afterward, and always on terrain chosen by the other side.
Education was different. Founding a school is not about preventing something. It is about building something that did not exist. It means occupying ground instead of merely defending it. In that sense—and the image is deliberate—education is an offensive, not a counterattack. It does not depend on an adversary to know what to do tomorrow.
There was also a second, harder reason. What is often called the culture of death attacks three pillars: life, family, and education. In the first two, material evidence can be shown: an ultrasound shows a beating heart, and the effects of a broken family can appear on a child’s face within months. With the third, that is not so. Education is the hardest pillar to defend because the damage is invisible in the short term and may only reveal itself a generation later. No one can photograph an intellect that was poorly formed at age ten.
This means that those who work in education cannot always rely on visible evidence. They have to argue, and to argue they must study constantly. More than that, they must maintain a spiritual life, because this is work whose fruits may not be seen within the worker’s own lifetime. Anyone who enters it expecting visible results may give up within two years.
The Decision to Educate at Home
Alongside the theory, there was the practical side—and that practical side was at home.
We came to the conclusion that there was no school within our reach to which we could entrust our children with peace of mind. So we decided to educate them at home.
Today, that may sound like one option among others. Ten years ago, it was almost inconceivable in Brazil. There was no community, little material in Portuguese, and no one with whom to compare experiences. It felt as though we were doing something simultaneously obvious and absurd, with no way of knowing which it really was.
Social media changed that. As other families began to appear—doing the same thing in other states, with different stories, arriving independently at the same conclusions—it became clear that this was not merely our own eccentricity. There was a movement, and far more people than anyone imagined were at home believing they were the only ones.
That discovery was the seed of everything. Because if there were so many families like this, what was missing was not conviction. It was structure.
2019: Escola Atlas
In 2019, a small initiative was born with no institutional ambition at all: an online History and Geography course called Escola Atlas.
The goal was to serve homeschooling families that needed classes in those two subjects. It was what we knew how to do—Edmilson is a historian—and it was what lay within our reach.
And it grew in a way we had not anticipated. There were far more students than the structure could support, and families began asking for more subjects, more grade levels, and more support.
With growth came a problem that enthusiasm alone cannot solve: certification. A family may educate its children at home with absolute excellence, but at some point that young person may want to enter a university, and for that they need recognized academic records. Without them, all the work remains suspended in uncertainty.
We began looking for a solution, and the search lasted much longer than we would like to admit.
The Flag
The solution was not in Brazil. It was in the United States.
We found an American Catholic school with decades of experience in classical education and homeschooling, accredited and well established, with a formal partnership program: Kolbe Academy in Napa, California. We wrote to them. Meetings followed. We explained what we were trying to do in Brazil, how many families we hoped to serve, and for what purpose.
And they accepted, in a way that was unprecedented in the institution’s history, which until then had never entered into a similar partnership with a Brazilian project.
It was sometime after this that we finally understood one half of a message we had received but had not understood.
Because in 2022—or perhaps 2023; our memories differ on the year—during a period of prayer, someone we did not know approached us with a message. Two images, with no explanation: sugarcane and the flag of the United States.
It made no sense. We had no connection with the United States and none with sugarcane. We thanked the person, kept the message, and continued without understanding it.
The flag had just explained itself.
The Name
With the partnership established, the project needed a name. And one had already been chosen: Beda Academy, in honor of Bede the Venerable, the eighth-century English monk, Doctor of the Church, and author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People and patron saint of historians. For a school founded by a historian, it was perfect.
But during prayer, another name kept returning insistently. Not a voice, nothing extraordinary—just the kind of thought that comes back uninvited and does not go away. The name was Carlo Acutis.
From the standpoint of the project, it made less sense than Bede. In 2023, Carlo Acutis was a recently beatified Italian teenager, with no direct connection to history or classical education.
We changed the name.
Today, it is impossible to look back without seeing what seemed to be indicated. A school that would operate through the internet, serving families throughout Brazil by means of screens, at a time when screens are a major instrument of harm to childhood, was placed under the patronage of the saint who used that very instrument for the opposite purpose. There was no way to see it at the time. Only afterward.
And there is the rest of his story, which must be told because it has a particular connection to this country.
We chose the name while he was still Blessed Carlo. He was canonized as the school continued to grow.
The Investment
What was still missing was money. Not a small amount: enough to transform an online course into an institution with structure, staff, and systems.
We did not have it. And we had no one to ask.
We prayed a novena to Carlo Acutis. During that novena, a family spontaneously came forward to make the investment that was needed. We did not seek them out. There was no fundraising campaign, no proposal, and no project presentation to investors.
One may call it a coincidence, and anyone who wishes to do so may. We prayed for nine days asking for something specific, and that specific thing happened within those nine days. We record the event as it happened and leave the reader with it.
The Sugarcane Field
The other half of the message remained.
At a certain point, growth required a physical presence: an address, a headquarters, a place for service and for the team. We began looking for a property in the city.
We found a building that had been abandoned for twenty years. Large, empty, forgotten, with the particular silence of places no one has entered for a long time. We went to inspect it.
We walked through the interior, evaluated what would need renovation, and then went out the back.
Behind the building was a sugarcane field.
We stood there for a while, looking at it. There was nothing supernatural about the scene. It was an ordinary sugarcane field behind an ordinary building in an ordinary city. And it was the second half of a message delivered by a stranger years earlier, which we had kept without understanding and without expecting ever to understand.
The flag was the partnership. The sugarcane was the headquarters.
How to Read a Story Like This
We are not naive about the genre of this text. Accounts of signs and providential coincidences are easy to write, difficult to verify, and the Catholic world produces more of them than may be prudent.
The Church has an ancient and sober criterion for this: judge by the fruits. No private revelation binds anyone, and discernment is made not by the intensity of the experience but by what it produces—whether it produces charity, obedience, humility, and concrete good, or vanity and agitation.
For that reason, we prefer to present the story as a narrated sequence of events without demanding from the reader more belief than they wish to give. We do not ask anyone to accept that there was a prophecy. We ask only that the sequence be noted: the message came first, and the two things happened afterward. What each person makes of that is up to them.
What we know—and what is enough for us to work—is that we did not plan it. And that the school is not ours.
What This Requires of Us
A story like this is beautiful to tell and is, in truth, a responsibility.
If the institution was born from things we did not control, then we cannot treat it simply as property. An entrepreneur who builds a company through personal effort has the right to dispose of it. Someone who has received something is a steward, and a steward is accountable.
And this applies to everyone who works here, not only to us. The school now has seventeen hundred students and directly supports ninety-six families. That number still surprises us, because neither of the scenarios we imagined in 2019 looked anything like this.
That it has reached this point is not a triumph of management. And the way to give thanks is not through sentiment, but by doing the work well every day, including the parts no one sees.
That is why devotion to St. Carlo Acutis is neither institutional decoration nor a branding strategy. It is the acknowledgment of a debt. Each stage of this story bears his mark: the name, the investment, and the unlikely fittingness of placing a school that operates through screens under the protection of the first saint who knew how to use them well.
He is the patron. He remains the school’s principal intercessor. And, to be frank, he has worked much more for this school than we have.
The Question That Remains
Everyone who works in an institution carries a silent answer to the question of what that institution is. A job. A career. A project. A mission.
What is yours?
Not the answer given in a meeting. The one that appears on a Tuesday morning when the day is difficult and no one is watching.
Discover Acutis Academy and the story of a school whose own founders say they never planned it.
For Further Reading
- St. Carlo Acutis: the documents from his beatification (2020) and canonization (2025), available on the Vatican website; and the memoirs written by his mother, Antonia Salzano Acutis (confirm the title of the Brazilian edition).
- BEDE THE VENERABLE. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The name the school almost had.
- NERY, Felipe (ed.). Gender: A Tool for the Deconstruction of Identity. São Paulo: Katechesis.
- PIUS XI. Divini Illius Magistri (1929). On the prior right of the family in the education of children, a foundation of Catholic homeschooling.
- SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL. Gravissimum Educationis (1965), § 3.
- On the discernment of signs and private revelations: Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 67; and ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA, Spiritual Exercises, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits.
