Each student is building a mastery portrait, comprised of his or her talents, experiences, faith, skills, and knowledge: the essential layers in the academic portrait of a child. It’s essential, then, that every student is given an opportunity to enroll in well-crafted courses, hosted by master teachers, rich with age-appropriate, engaging pedagogy and opportunities for growth. This is why we’ve added courses specifically designed for the middle-school student.

Mark Twain famously said of teenagers, “When a boy turns 13, put him in a barrel and feed him through a knot hole. When he turns 16, plug up the hole.” At Scholé Academy, we’d instead prefer to respond to the teenage years as Dorothy Sayers advised in her famous “Lost Tools of Learning” essay:

It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age [middle school] to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.

We’ve worked to devise some “good purposes” to which middle-school students (target grades 6–9) can attend. In addition to Latin and logic (classes we’ve always offered), we’ve now added mathematics, literature, history, and science: perfect places for teenagers to continue to build arguments, learn to spot fallacies, and hone their wits!

At Scholé Academy, we have carefully considered how we should engage our contemporary culture as those who believe that Christ is the Truth (John 14:6), and that all truth has its source in him. We think it is important to provide our upper school students (in grades 7-12) with tools and opportunities for critically examining various cultural trends, issues and mores through the lens of orthodox, Christian beliefs. Being confident in the truth revealed to us in creation, the Scriptures, and the tradition of the church, we are not afraid to follow the truth and its implications nor to address error and falsehood. … Read more about our Faith & Culture.

“… there is in the human mind the light of knowledge that will remain hidden like the spark of the flint, unless it be brought forth by the repeated efforts of a teacher.” —Alcuin of York, in Andrew Flemming West, Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools.