What makes education at Christ Academy Unique?

In the study of the humanities, we expose students to the golden threads that Jesus has woven throughout the great artifacts of human culture. They discover the concepts and compelling pictures of beauty, wisdom, virtue, justice, and honor. They encounter a breadth of truth, and they learn excellence through experiencing it firsthand. Notably, however, this study of the humanities is not merely a matter of intellectual acquisition. It is also moral formation. In keeping with the fundamental values of classical, Christian education, the study of the humanities seeks to develop true humanity within students.  

Because of their innate interconnectedness, humanities are taught in a block format. This happens in age-appropriate ways, even at the primary level, but by the time our students reach secondary school, they are integrating Literature, History, Philosophy, Theology, and even the Arts. The curriculum focuses on deep, extended interaction with a limited selection of key texts. Instead of information-heavy lectures, instructors supply mimetic teaching and Socratic discussion. Students listen keenly in order to understand, develop, and practice critical thinking, judicious discernment, and creative, clear communication, both oral and written. Their interlocutors are not only the great thinkers and communicators of the past whom they encounter in classic texts, but they also engage one another and even their teachers. Over time, through patient guidance, students internalize the excellence of the tradition. They learn to name and own God’s providential direction and care throughout history, across the breadth of human pursuits. In this way, they grow more fully into the humanity that God has created for them because of Jesus Christ, the source and model of all truth.

Since our goal is relationship with our Creator, not simply awareness of Him, we begin study of math and science by cultivating happy curiosity. Jesus himself delights in his creation, and we learn to know Him well by imitating his own appreciation for the marvels of bugs and stars and algorithms and formulae. From this starting point, students who excel in math and science receive a compelling invitation to humility and gratitude, students without natural aptitude for math and science may find encouragement and joy, and all students hear the call to steward creation, as their studies announce the primacy of Jesus Christ.

Excellence in math and science undoubtedly requires memorization of many facts, but our approach does not enshrine data acquisition as the high mark of excellence. Rather, we use the facts as springboards into the deep skills of inquiry, observation, reasoning, documentation, and persuasion. Across the centuries, these skills have fed scientific enterprise in service of the common good, which we want students to understand; as we explore various axioms and theorems and methods, we also celebrate the connections to our notable predecessors. In other words, students participate in an education that integrates information with community. And in this way they imitate Christ, the one who created the theater for math and science in the first place.

Since we aim to form an expansive humanity within our students, we load our education with broad exposure to the beauty of visual, musical, and performative art. Beauty is itself an encounter with God; he alone is beauty itself. The arts, then, are a gift from God. They penetrate beneath the fabric of our cognition to provide us with a lived experience of God’s being, but not in a way that replaces God. Since only God himself fully satisfies the human heart, the arts can only stir an appetite for God; they give a taste of his beauty, moving us, shaping us to discover the fullness of life in him through Jesus Christ. An education without beauty is thus incomplete. 

At Christ Academy, we teach music as the sound and rhythm of beauty. The visual arts are the appearance of beauty. Performative arts engage ears and eyes with the movement of beauty. We recognize that students may differ in their appreciation of the arts, but we also acknowledge that appreciation of art requires training in community. We help our students to develop a love for beauty by teaching them its components through lingering encounter with its most celebrated expressions. We also nurture our students in their own artistic productions because, just as God has given the arts in order to reveal something of himself for our joy, so he calls us, in imitation of himself, to develop and deploy our artistic abilities for the sake of others’ delight. 

All language is a small participation in Jesus Christ. In saying this, we do not mean that language offers salvific encounter with Jesus - but we do mean that, like beauty, language is a window onto the divine being. God himself, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is eternally communicating in whole relationships; the three persons are perpetually unified in understanding. In the incarnation of Jesus, God the Son embodied this eternal communication. As we read in John’s gospel, “he made known” the invisible God. Jesus was (and is) the Word made flesh. When we communicate, we are faintly but genuinely imitating this mystery. But all language is limited. We will never fully capture the mystery of God. We will never exhaust the wonders of thought. There will always be more to say. When we accept this limitation, we live in the truth, and we open ourselves to a world of discovery within community.

The term trivium refers to time-tested instruction in the art and skill of language. Classical education at Christ Academy takes the trivium—in its divisions of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—to be the most refined and useful approach to language within our heritage. We employ this time-tested instruction in our Humanities, Composition, Rhetoric, Logic, and Latin courses. These skills are built slowly and carefully starting with the proper practice of language’s rules and rhythms (grammar). Once grammar skills have begun to gel, our students build skills in the art of thinking and the use of language to construct meaningful argument (logic). And finally, as this study is expanding the mind’s capacity to think and communicate clearly, we begin instruction in the art of discourse that seeks to convince and transform through goodness and life-giving persuasion (rhetoric). We nurture our students in the development of rhetorical skills in order to develop strength of character and creative voice. But even more, this approach to language offers our students a richer and fuller participation in the life of Jesus and his kingdom.