Classical Tradition
In the classical tradition, the goal of education is to foster wise adults who love the Good, True, and Beautiful and embrace them as gifts from God. We look to the great works of Christian Civilization because in them we find truth and beauty as essential for human flourishing today as when they were written.
What makes a Liberal Arts Education different?
"Liberal education…aim[s] not just at furnishing the mind with serviceable knowledge and information, nor even at habituating the mind to rational methods, but at leading it to wisdom, to a quality of knowledge tempered by experience and imbued with understanding.
It should, in a word, humanize. Unguided by such an aim, education loses its true character and finds itself degraded to servile training for the world’s daily drudgeries.”
Tracey Simmons
Climbing Parnassus
"Compared with men of genius, we are only children, but we are children with an inheritance. What they give us is ours because it belongs to eternity."
A. G. Sertillanges
Curriculum
“Curriculum” comes from the Latin currere, meaning “to run.” The curriculum for your school is the course or path the students, parents, and teachers run to attain fullness of self: that is to say, they attain the true virtue.
Great Books
It has been said a true education is about what you love rather than what you know. At Theophany Academy, students feast on beautiful works that have stood the test of time. Their taste and conscience is then formed by what has shaped Christian civilization for ages rather than the current zeitgeist.
Latin
A hallmark of a Classical education for millennia has been the mastery of ancient languages of Greek and Latin. At Theophany Academy, we are not satisfied with a cursory exposure to ancient languages to check a box. Instead, we will train students in Latin to fluency, so in their final years, they'll be reading Great Works in their original language.
7 Liberal Arts
Rather than teaching conventional subjects, which divide the day into artificial units, the Village School teaches the seven liberal arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, harmonia, and astronomy. The teacher weaves these together as integrated disciplines supporting each other, rather treating them like isolated subjects.
7 Liberal Arts
Foundational Skills
Students will be working through CIRCE's Tapestry curriculum learning parts of speech, practicing dictation, and copywork modeled off of fables, fairy tales and Shakespeare.
Students will develop the skills of logic through ancient primary texts like Porphyry's classic text
CIRCE's Lost Tools of Writing will form the development of the skills of rhetoric while students learn to invent, think, reason and communicate with clarity and style.
Theophany Academy places a pride of place on proof, play and puzzle. Students will be articulating the reasons behind the algorithms they learn in mathematics from year 1, so they are developed in mathematical reasoning for later study.
Students will work through Euclid's geometry, articulating each postulate and discerning the beauty and order in the world as well as developing strong reasoning skills.
Theophany Academy students will dedicate a significant amount of time during the school day toward music- first through singing throughout the day. Furthermore students will be instructed in violin at school and be required to practice each day during school.
Students will begin their astronomy education with a literacy in the myths of constellations, moving toward a fluency of understanding of the heavens throughout the seasons, with a final capstone reading the original works of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein.
Latin Fluency
Primary Texts
We want our students to come of age with the ability to converse not only with the living but also with the dead — to meet in the pages of books some of the greatest men and women who have gone before us, to think their thoughts after them, to wrestle with them, and to befriend them. Latin is the language of Newton and Copernicus, of Caesar and Cicero, of the Holy Martyr Perpetua and St. Gregory the Dialogist. The ultimate goal for our students is to attain command of the language so that they may read and understand these and other authors in their original language. Not only will they able to read them, but they will read them!
Methodology
We teach Latin in Latin, with students always learning the meaning of words and phrases in context. The repeated exposure to essential vocabulary and grammatical forms through a written narrative and oral instruction are complemented by an active use of the language which develops the student's skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Vocabulary and grammar are always studied in context and are taught in a systematic way using the direct method of instruction.
Why Latin?
Much of what can be said for Latin study can be said of Greek as well. We love Greek and encourage our students to learn it someday! The reason we prioritize Latin is twofold: First, it is traditional to study Latin first, even in some Eastern Orthodox homelands, because it is more similar to other European languages than Greek is, and therefore it is easier to master. Secondly, Latin is the root of well over half of English words, and learning the language from which our words have come deepens our understanding of English literature a way that cannot be attained by any other route.
Arts and Gymnastics
“There are two types of education… One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.”