Augustine Classical Academy

AT ITS CORE, CLASSICAL CHRISTIAN EDUCATION ACCOMPLISHES THREE THINGS:

• It teaches all subjects as components of an integrated whole, created and ordered by God.
• It cultivates wisdom and virtue by feeding the mind and soul works that are true, good, and beautiful.
• It fosters in students a love of learning and equips them with tools for a lifetime of discovery.

WHAT YOU`LL FIND AT ACA

• An educational approach that recognizes the centrality of Christ
• Staff devoted to creating nurturing, gracious, and orderly classrooms
• A community devoted to educating the whole child
• Small class sizes with no class larger than 16 students
• A commitment to making this high-quality private education affordable for all families

Classical, Christian education is a new, old thing. Nearly all of the most influential people in Western civilization over the last 1,000 years were classically educated: Nicolaus Copernicus, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, John Adams, Johann Gutenberg-just to name a few.

Today`s classical, Christian education takes richness of content-literature, mathematics, science, grammar, art, history, music, Latin, logic, rhetoric-and combines it with some of what we know now about a child`s natural brain development. Supporting this time-tested methodology is a posture of worship to the Living God who is the Good Author of all there is to know, all there is to teach, and all there is to learn.

In the grammar phase (roughly K-5), students learn the fundamental rules and elements of each subject. We know that children at this age enjoy memorization, so in these early years of their education, they learn facts: poetry; Latin vocabulary; the stories of literature and history; math facts; descriptions and functions of the human body, plants, and animals; the rules of English grammar. In short, students in these ages are (eagerly) absorbing the grammar-or foundational knowledge-for the next stage of their education.

Next is logic (roughly the middle-school years). As students become more analytical in their thinking-exploring cause and effect, relationships among disparate topics, and the ways facts relate in a logical framework-instruction in logic expands. For example, in writing, students learn to support a thesis; in reading, they learn to analyze texts for truth and fallacy; in science, they learn to use the scientific method.

The last phase of a classical education, during the high school years, is rhetoric, which builds on the first two phases. Students learn to apply the rules of logic to the knowledge they`ve built during their classical education and express their ideas in clear, expressive, persuasive language.

These three elements-grammar, logic, and rhetoric-together make up the Trivium, Latin for "the place where three roads meet."

So what? Learning in a classical setting gives context and structure to knowledge; instead of a system of education whose organizing principle is standardized testing, classical education enables students to see the interconnectedness of all knowledge. No more "silo" subjects, taught in vacuums. Here, all there is to know relates-and points to the nature of God the Creator and Redeemer.

Note: This summary is adapted from The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, which you can find here.