Our educational priorities begin with a simple, pivotal premise: that children are embodied image bearers of God, made to behold God’s glory, to which all the world is the theatre and redemption the story.
1. Tuning the heart to love goodness, truth, and beauty. The Great Commandment attests to our fundamental nature as creatures who love. Thus do all our choices and experiences shape us toward some end. The question is, What is shaping our children, and how? The books we read, the art we make, the company we keep, the rhythms of our life – what are these doing to us? Whereas conventional educational tends to ask, ‘What can I do with this learning?’ classical education asks, ‘What will this learning do to me?’ Education is about formation, not information. We cultivate culture and atmosphere of our school to be one of honour, service, activity, and curiosity. We nurture good practices and routines to discipline good habits. And we nourish ourselves with truth, goodness, and beauty. Through these means under God’s grace do we help cultivate students’ character and open a window onto their future, that they might say with others past, ‘My destiny is to manifest the glory of God.’
Understanding this, we have therefore taken care in identifying the remaining priorities of our school.
2. Furnishing the imagination with a rich, integrated curriculum of living books and great art. As the body needs to feed, so also the mind. A child’s mind is a “spiritual organism… with an appetite for all knowledge” (Charlotte Mason). We therefore set before them a knowledge-rich, story-rich banquet of a curriculum, setting their feet in a large room and inspiring a breadth of interests and competencies. The image and gospel of God is so woven into our fabric that it always finds some expression in our creative works, and in some instances magnificently so. Classical education recovers the best and inspiring stories in its tradition, engraving them upon our hearts, and thereby providing a common inheritance and cohesiveness that is both existential and social. So taught Moses, the prophets and apostles; so taught Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. We therefore prioritize selecting the best and living stories, music, and art as windows onto the glory of God, to inspire a noble vision of life. “He who walks with the wise grows wise” (Solomon), and good literature provides an experience to live vicariously in the shoes of the characters, learning how to navigate a world with temptation, discouragement, evil, nobility, and beauty. All of this happens in the care and guidance of our scholar-teachers in whom lives the life, colour, and air of this inheritance.
3. Training the mind to master the language and mathematical arts. The seven liberal arts reduce the infinity of possible arts and sciences to a manageable set that is designed to make all future learning more simple and effective. These seven are comprised of two groups, the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium (Latin for “the place where three paths meet”) encompasses the three language arts of grammar, dialectic/logic, and rhetoric. The Quadrivium (Latin for “the place where four paths meet”) encompasses the four mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Far from arbitrary, a grounding in these arts provides students with the tools of learning to master any subject or specialty.
4. Expanding capacities for attention, appreciation, and craft. We prioritize helping our students to attend to the matter at hand, to the things of worthwhile and enduring interest. This is even more necessary in our age of distraction and consumption. We become what we behold, and therefore what we attend to, and our capacities for this, matter. We do this with attentive listening during stories, and having students practice narration: the telling back of the story in detail from memory from a single hearing. We study great works of art, maps, and music, and practice reproducing them in detail. “Imitation precedes art.” By recreating worthwhile art, we apprentice with the masters, and become capable of great art ourselves.
5. Working with our hands and enjoying nature. We give precedence to beauty and to nature, an atmosphere less institutional and more home, garden, studio, cathedral. We get our hands dirty. We sing, chant, paint, and explore our backyard. We play sports, theatre, and just for fun. Paradoxically, the right kind of play and work nurtures concentration, thoughtfulness, responsibility, independence, discernment, and comradery – the habits accustomed to educated persons.