About Us

Philosophy of Education

Education is about more than just academics: it involves the whole person, including our worldview, culture, habits of thinking and acting, and character. Our school exists to partner with parents to form students into well-rounded, thoughtful individuals.

The goals of education are summed up by the Four W’s. Education begins with wonder at the world, leading to the attainment of wisdom, which enables us to work effectively as individuals and members of a community, all in a context of worship to God, the creator and sustainer of all things.

Our rigorous course of classical study is grounded in a biblical worldview. It enables students to acquire knowledge in a wide range of fields and learn to think carefully and responsibly in a world that has largely abandoned biblical values and scorns our intellectual heritage. Our graduates will therefore be uniquely equipped to lead the effort to reverse the cultural decline that defines our age.

We seek to:

Encourage every child in the development and maintenance of his relationship with God.
Provide models of Christian living through all staff members.
Teach all subjects as parts of an integrated whole with the truth of Scripture at the center.
Expose students to the very best of human expression in literature, art, and music.
Inspire in our students a love for learning and a desire for the achievement of excellence.
Encourage our students to develop a genuine desire to live a life of service.
Create and maintain the culture and atmosphere required for these goals.

The Four W’s are a shorthand way to describe how education naturally proceeds when unfettered by unnatural constrictions. Too often, modern schools are artificially limited to the third, work. What students study is limited to what “works,” with the overriding goal of producing individuals who “work” – that is, useful employees who can function as part of the economy. To be clear, work is important, necessary, and even commanded in scripture. But conceiving of people as only or primarily workers stunts the growth of children and inhibits their development into the well-rounded, unique individuals made in God’s image that they are meant to be. At the same time, school can become mere drudgery. Small aims make small minds.

In contrast, classical Christian education is based on a nuanced understanding of human beings’ abilities, needs, and tendencies. School should feed the soul, not kill it. Academic learning is necessarily a difficult journey, but one that, when pursued rightly, allows children to bloom into their full potential. The Four W’s serve as a guide for all of our curriculum and activities.

Wonder

Education begins with wonder. Young children especially are full of wonder at the world, as they experience it new and afresh. The impulse to ask, “what is that?” or “why?” can exhaust parents, who may have lost the sense of wonder at the world’s beauty and strangeness. This impulse is the proper beginning of learning – a self-motivated desire to accumulate knowledge about the world, about ourselves, and about our creator. At ALCA, our classical framework is built to fit the natural progress of development. We consciously seek to cultivate wonder at every level, but especially in the lower grades, where we focus on finding fun ways to fill children’s minds with knowledge.

Wisdom

Wisdom is the proper result of the conscious cultivation of knowledge. As students grow and accumulate knowledge, when properly guided, that knowledge will grow into understanding about how to engage properly with oneself, with others, with the world, and with God. This cannot be effectively and rightly done outside of a Christian context.

Work

Work is not only commanded by God in scripture; it is the necessary use and fulfillment of knowledge and wisdom. Work in this sense is not limited to one’s career or vocational choice, though it includes this. While education should not take career or employment as its ultimate goal, it is important, nonetheless. We strive to inculcate a strong work ethic in all our students, which is a better predictor of success even than natural ability.

But it is important that children understand work in another sense, for the world itself works. Too often, science classes have been consumed with the sterile air of the laboratory, with little connection to anything in ordinary life. Our elementary science curriculum, by contrast, returns to a focus on observing and understanding how the world works, even in the plants, trees, and animals we see in our neighborhood. This forms a much better foundation for more advanced learning in the later years, and it also stimulates and feeds wonder in a way that abstract learning does not.

Worship

The proper end of all education is also the proper end of human beings: worship to God. While we cannot educate someone into authentically held faith, education is naturally and rightly an important part of discipleship, as it shapes us and our beliefs and worldview. We seek to place all learning in its proper context, which is worship to God, who created all things about which we can accumulate knowledge. This is why every subject and every lesson at ALCA is biblically integrated – because the world and truth itself are biblically integrated.