Our aim is to support Christian homeschooling families in their pursuit of wisdom and virtue so that students can know God and glorify Him forever.
Our community holds to the Christian classical tradition. One of the great strengths of the classical model of education is a perspective that assigns highest value to the training of the whole person - mind, soul and heart. This perspective affirms God’s words found in Deuteronomy 6:5 “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” We are committed to a philosophy of education that acknowledges the belief that children are “born persons” as Charlotte Mason said, multifaceted, individual souls created in the image of God.
We are unapologetically Christ-centered in our approach to learning, believing that all truth belongs first to God. In terms of our approach to God’s Word and Bible teaching, we adhere to the historic creeds of the Christian church as well as our Scholé Statement of Belief. Our primary calling as home educating parents is discipleship. Parents model this by maintaining a posture of learning and growth in our own lives, knowing and believing that the best things are ‘caught not taught’. This lifestyle of learning is treasured by homeschooling families.
Our intent is to embody the Latin maxim multum non multa, meaning much not many. From a practical glance, this looks like spending ample time on fewer subjects to instill a love of learning and create lifelong, independent learners. This mantra encourages a deeper and lasting grasp of less subjects at a time rather than cultivating a forced mediocrity at a multitude of things by overloading the plates of our students in their feast of learning. The purposeful scope of learning for our community includes the liberal arts of language, literature and history. While we have not chosen to study the liberal arts of mathematics and science on community day, we value those important subjects and heartily support the pursuit of knowledge and mastery of them in each family homeschool.
Together, we seek to meaningfully engage with Great Books and the great ideas that transcend time which have seen the span of the ages and founded Western Civilization. Always keeping the heart of “scholé” at center stage - a beautiful word we can thank the Greeks for, meaning “undistracted time to study what is most meaningful” - Christopher Perrin. Scholé doesn’t mean lazy learning, rather a very intentional, well-ordered (but still active) pursuit of rightly ordered loves. We have carefully selected books and materials that we believe manifest the order of beauty and truth.
We are a family-oriented homeschool community. We highly value the input, leadership and presence of homeschooling dad’s and hope they are able to join us for as many classes, events and Cafe nights as possible.
Pursue wisdom & truth…
God’s Word is our first source for wisdom and truth which we will study in community each week.
Charlotte Mason believed that in order to be a “living book” it must be enjoyable to the child but that they must labor over it as well. We hope to select books that both captivate and challenge our students!
Reading and discussing great books rich with meaning, timeless truth and beautiful language by its very nature assists us in our pursuit of wisdom.
Encounter wonder…
Believing that “Wisdom begins in wonder” -Socrates, our calendar runs in (roughly) 6 week terms, allowing a Wonder Week. This week offers a change of pace, a sabbath of sorts to marvel at the created world, choose an adventure, do a project together, whatever your family desires. There will be a community wide wonder excursion on these weeks for anyone who would like to come.
Every 6 weeks we will meet for a potluck after class, including dads! Scholé Café….great food, great friends and great beauty (art, poetry, a short play, photography, any creative project can be shared!). This potluck time will include recitation & sharing where we celebrate beauty and share what wonders we have encountered lately.
Growing in virtue…
Virtue is not something we can manufacture or manipulate into existence. Our pursuit of and engagement with truth, goodness and beauty as presented in our wide feast is an opportunity, an invitation to grow in virtue. This well-intentioned pursuit must be partnered with a reverence of the role of the Holy Spirit as the Supreme Educator of mankind, who ultimately forms and shapes our children.
The reality of life and learning in community with other work-in-progress, imperfect humans also naturally gives us a wonderful training ground for growth.
Students will be assigned into multi age “house” groups to cultivate leadership opportunities for older students. They will participate in field day games and in Bible time in these groups.
““True education is a form of repentance. It is a humble admission that we’ve not read all that we need to read, we don’t know all that we need to know, and we’ve not yet become all that we are called to become. Education is that unique form of discipleship that brings us to the place of admitting our inadequacies.” ”