Academics

Classical education attends to a young person’s heart and mind by leading them toward moral and intellectual virtue. It offers students the accumulated wisdom of the “best which has been thought and said,” and liberates them to learn what is true, do what is good, and love what is beautiful. By teaching students to cultivate virtue, classical education leads them toward lives of freedom and moral responsibility. Students learn to govern themselves and acknowledge their duty to their families, their city, and their country.  

What is Classical Education?

Academically, a classical education encompasses:

  • A curriculum that is content-rich, balanced, and inter-connected across the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history 

  • Explicit instruction in phonics and grammar 

  • An approach to instruction that acknowledges objective standards of correctness, logic, beauty, weightiness, and truth

  • A well-educated and articulate faculty who care deeply for their students and teach through excellent questions 

  • A school culture of moral virtue, decorum, respect, discipline, and studiousness among both students and faculty

  • A three-phased conception of the trajectory of an education – known traditionally at the trivium – that consists of a progression from grammar through logic to rhetoric within each subject

  • A study of order in the natural world built fundamentally upon the four sciences of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music

  • A belief that math and sciences are more than job preparation and give students a language for understanding the order of the universe

  • A love of great books and a belief that stories and conversations about them change us as human beings

  • An ultimate aim of preparing students for lives of human flourishing

Classical Education at Cherokee Classical Academy

  • We do not claim to cover the entirety of all the best things, but anything we put in front of our students should be from the category – or class – of what is best (and therefore what is most engaged with what is most human about us). We think these excellent things might help students be both happier and more virtuous. 

  • We hope an education at CCA orders the affections of our students such that they can identify what is good and beautiful and even more so that they love what is good and beautiful.

  • We see wisdom, not skill development, as the ultimate end of an education. So, in our mission, rather than promise that students will become competitive members of a global economy, we make the much more humane statement that we are trying to form knowledgeable, virtuous citizens.

  • Because words are the fundamental building block of all human thought, we order our education to fit that. We talk about teaching in every course as making students better “readers” within that subject. As they become better readers, students grow in their ability to understand how parts of problems and texts fit together in order to make meaning of the whole. This leads us to focus on a “confederation” of the disciplines in how we structure course and graduation requirements – meaning that we seek to show alignment across subjects.

  • Virtues are objective things that have been traditionally important and can be measured by a standard; values are subjective and ever-changing. The content of a classical education emphasizes virtues, and the result should be increasingly virtuous students. 

  • This may seem like a luddite idiosyncrasy, but it corresponds to our wider conviction that a curriculum should not be constantly trying to adapt to external forces. It takes thirteen years’ worth of close, uninhibited (by screens) attention even to start wrapping one’s mind around the best of what has been thought and said in human history. There is a war for our attention, and we think the greatest books of our civilization deserve it the most.