The CiRCE model village school believes that the role of education is to preserve culture and foster wise, loving, and virtuous students. To that end, we study the seven liberal arts, read the Great Books, teach Latin throughout the day (not just in Latin class), honor liturgy, and train the body and the ear through music and exercise. 

 

The Village School Model
 

The idea of the Orthodox Village School is drawn from the parochial school, home-school, and one-room school-house models.  These institutions best reflect the learning of children in corporate settings.
 

In its parochial element, what makes the CiRCE Village School model Orthodox is its purpose: to participate in the Church’s total catechesis of its members through the acquisition of the Orthodox phronema.  The Orthodox Tradition has distinct commitments concerning the nature, end, means, and matter of human life; these commitments must be clearly manifested by the nature, end, means and matter of any institution intending to serve the same.  We therefore should expect Orthodox education to look, feel, and be as different from conventional schooling as the Divine Liturgy is from modern worship services. The CiRCE Village School is not just to inform students as to riches of the Orthodox tradition, nor simply to shelter them from the politically motivated secularism and immorality of the age, but must also participate with the Church in seeking to embody and cultivate the Phronema of the Orthodox Tradition that seeks theosis.
 

The CiRCE Village School contains an element of the home-school.  In Genesis, after the loss of Paradise and many subsequent catastrophes, God begins again His great work of renewal and redemption with the families of the patriarchs.  The CiRCE Institute believes that this is the pattern of renewal for our day.  The family is the model of a well-run academy: parents that model the life of virtue through discipleship and love rather than management and administration; children of various ages engaging the worship, work, and learning; an atmosphere and environment that is communal and based on love.  Beyond this, the CiRCE Institute believes that any education in the life of virtue, any participation in the life of Church, and any vibrant and supportive paidudic community requires the engagement, inclusion, and participation of the family.  The CiRCE Village School membership therefore, is not to be construed in terms of students, teachers, administrators, but rather in terms of households.  Every level of the membership has a role to play, responsibilities to fulfill, and commitments that they are accountable for.
 

The CiRCE Village School also weaves in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse.  The one-room schoolhouse dates from classical antiquity and represented the shared commitments of the community that surrounded it in the passing on of culture (paideia).  As such, every member of the community was a stakeholder in its success, was a supporter of its needs and activities, and participated in its discipleship of children.  The one room school-house was age-integrated, as was the community that surrounded it; its teaching reflected both the practical requirements of the life of the community and its aspirations; its schedule fitted to the priorities of the community as well, whether political, religious, or agricultural.  The tradition of the one-room school-house most appropriately reflects the relationship of the school within the community as one of mutual and internal support, rather than of a more transactional and external business entity.  The CiRCE Village School must be in and for the Orthodox community; sharing its commitments, providing a locus of participation, and harmonizing with its experience of time.
 

It is these three traditions of education that the CiRCE Village School seeks to blend to best set the conditions for the learning of children within a corporate setting.  By prioritizing the Orthodox Phronema, the CiRCE Village school will tailor its material, means, and form to the ends for which the Church was instituted.  By prioritizing the family, the CiRCE Village School brings the energy and activity of education in the oikonomia of the home with its life and virtue-nurturing power; both sustaining, and being sustained by, strong families.  By prioritizing the one-room school-house, the CiRCE Orthodox Village School will harness the pedagogical power of the kairos through the most important of all sociological means; the structuring of the student's time and experience aimed in preparation for life together aligned with the Cosmos.  It is foundational to this program that only in a place where the truth of what a human person is known and modeled, will children experience the paidea that the Church fathers recommend. It is also a foundational truth of this program that children only acquire what the adults in their community are participating in and value. Finally, it is foundational to this program that the very structure of time, class, and operations of an Orthodox education should be coherent with the image of the Church as the body of Christ; the one who fills all-in-all.  These three elements fulfill the mandate of scripture that we “...be not conformed to this world...but be...transformed through the renewal of your minds (phronema).”

The School Schedule 
 

Both time and space are objective aspects of concrete existence, they exist to order and qualify all things in accordance with their natures.  One Orthodox writer has said that they serve as the temperature, a kind of assessment of things.  Great care should be to order and qualify all activities of a school in line with their cosmological value.  For example, in the development of children it is more essential that meals, regularly sequenced and with the same people, be the experience of children over that of more “smart” patterns of correction or training.  It is to the ordering principle of time that student outcomes are most affected.

For a CiRCE Village School, Christian classical inquiry rather than specific subjects dedicated to acquisition of facts, useful programs, or rational methods should be that which qualifies the time and liturgical schedule of the daily, weekly, or yearly school experience. Inquiry into the life of the Church, the realm of creation as access by the liberal arts, and Holy Week should be the lived experience and form of instruction. The Church’s conception of time should be utilized as a generative framework and symbolic overlay to the daily activities, encounters, and educational segments of the day; prayer, feasting, and hospitality should be formally paraded in the childs time at school. “Wisdom, let us attend.”

The purpose of the school calendar is to enable the children and their families to participate in the life of the Church and the Great Tradition. Therefore, The Village school is baptizing and sanctifying time itself in the nourishment and education of the souls of children.  Just as a good gardener tends his garden by planning, planting, nurturing, and harvesting in accordance with the proprieties of time and the progression of the seasons, how much more should the good teacher see with this analogous craft prescriptions and priorities for the care and nurturing of children, made in the image of God, and of inestimably greater value (Matthew 6:25-34)?
 

The Sanctification of Time: Year, Season, Week, and Day.
 

The Orthodox Church's liturgical conception of the year begins and ends with the birth and death of an ideal type of the human person: the Blessed Theotokos. Her life lived in time fully bore witness, as we each ought to as well for each other, to the Word made flesh.  Just so the entire ecclesial calendar, as it begins with her birth and ends with her death, is intended to bear witness to Christ the Logos and to, by its very order of services and sequence, to enable those who observe it to  “walk as He walked, for as He is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4:17).  The Theotokos exists, the Church exists, the school exists to bring into time and the life of the world Christ.

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The Year
 

The CiRCE Village School's year begins and ends in accordance with the Church's calendar.  It is divided up into three trimesters that conform to the three fasting seasons of the Church.  While some holy days may align with modern holidays, the village school student's experience of time will be ecclesial and reality oriented; the temptation to conform to the way and methods and passions of this world are transformed by the life and the form of time within that of the Church and the Orthodox village school.

 

A Prospective Day in the Life of a Village School
 

8:00-8:30 Drop-off / Free Time: Greetings, organization, set-up

1st Section of Day; Reading and Reflecting: 8:30-10:00

8:30-9:00 Morning prayers (variable)

9:00-10:30 A story is read to all in which an issue is identified.  Groups are broken off to discuss what the character should do.  They come back together and present their findings.

2nd Section; Exercises, Practice, and Play: 10:00-11:30

Break out into skill subjects.  These are to be in 15 min increments with 30 min group times for assessment (like musical conservatories).  Traditionally these are the 3 R’s and Language.  These are almost endlessly variable and should be flexible—even if a liturgical form emerges tutors should be sensitive for the need for modulation.

15 Min of math

15 min of Latin

30 min: Group can come together for tutorial, recitation, or assessment

15 min of reading

15 min of writing

30 Min: Group can come together for tutorial, recitation, or assessment

Midday Break: 11:30-1:00

11:30-12:15 Lunch: Formal lunch in which the students decide the rules governing table behavior.

12:15-1:00 Free time, gymnastic activity, play.  Tutors meet and makes notes, plan, read, or discuss.

3rd Section; Performance, Memory, and Reflection: 1:00-2:30

1:00-1:15 Handwriting, commonplacing, nature journaling

1:15-2:00 Memory work; embodiment (project/art), Music, Theater, Dance.

2:00-2:30 return to the issue of the morning for discussion in groups and sharing in themain group.

End of Day Routines: 2:30-3:05

2:30-3:00 Stewardship of space, clean-up.

3:05 Dismissal

As this is hypothetical: the terms and times are inessential.  The Logos of the Village School Day is Christ the Logos: and we learn about the  Logos through input/information/memory, practice/skill/play, and ideas/encounters/recreations.

Or as Andrew K would say: Exercise, Practice, Performance.