In life, it’s common to have an elevator speech. The idea is how do you encapsulate who you are or what your product or service is in the time it takes to ride an elevator.  With that theme, I’ve put together a series of slides that encapsulate Leman Academy of Excellence in 6 slides.  Here they are;

First, the pillars of  Classical Education:

 

Then the core of who Dr. Leman is.  After 50+ books, a career as a clinical family psycologist and media and conference speaker, Dr. Leman has a body of work that forms the core of what our schools are all about. In a word, RELATIONSHIPS are everything;

Next, the Trivium and the 3 stages of learning. The stages naturally follow the child’s development. We start at the Grammar stage and build up facts and base knowledge. Right when kids naturally start asking “why”, we move into the Logic stage. Then on to the Rhetoric stage where all the base knowledge and inquiry can move to scholars holding the stage and debating the big ideas.

The scholars immerse themselves in the time frame they are studying.  For example, our 3rd and 7th graders study the Rennaissance.  During the year from art, to music, history to science, all the major discoveries, and thoughts of that time frame are explored.

Interwoven subjects.

Finally, we asked Dr. Leman; ‘What’s the goal of our school for a graduating 8th grader?’  His answer was short and profound.  He told us that he wants the goal to be that our scholars are aware of other.  In this world of selfies and social media, the act of getting a middle schooler to be aware of how their actions affect others is no easy task.  To get there, we have to model the values and virtues in every aspect of our school. From our leadership to our teachers, our goals is always to show the scholars what is Good – True – and Beautiful.

 

You may know about Dr. Leman and you may have heard about Classical Education but Charlotte Mason tends to be a new concept for many parents.  Here’s a great summation of how Charlotte Mason infused ideas are introduced into our system:

The Necessity of a Broad and Generous Curriculum

By Brandy Vencel 

I think it was rather revolutionary of Charlotte Mason to declare that, at the end of a child’s education,

The question is not, — how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education — but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? {Vol. 6, p. 170}

Charlotte Mason says something similar about Darwin:

We know how Darwin lost himself in science until he could not read poetry, find pleasure in pictures, think upon things divine; he was unable to turn his mind out of the course in which it had run for most of his life. {Vol. 6, p. 24}

Charlotte Mason’s argues for a “broad and generous” curriculum. She acknowledges that all children will not take to all subjects, but nevertheless we have no right to limit the curriculum:

I know you may bring a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. What I complain of is that we do not bring our horse to the water. We give him miserable little text-books, mere compendiums of facts, which he is to learn off and say and produce at an examination; or we give him various knowledge in the form of warm diluents, prepared by his teacher with perhaps some grains of living thought to the gallon. {Vol. 3, p. 171}

In fact, the child has the right to a broad curriculum:

[T]he field of a child’s knowledge may not be artificially restricted, that he has a right to and necessity for as much and as varied knowledge as he is able to receive; and that the limitations in his curriculum should depend only upon the age at which he must leave school… {Vol. 6, p. 12}

In other words, we cannot allow any one subject to dominate the curriculum:

Mathematics are a necessary part of every man’s education; they must be taught by those who know; but they may not engross the time and attention of the scholar in such wise as to shut out any of the score of ‘subjects,’ a knowledge of which is his natural right. {Vol. 6, p. 233}

And we always present facts in their context {so that they aren’t merely “learning them off and producing them at examinations” — context is more likely to produce care, which is Miss Mason’s highest concern}:

The mind is restricted to pabulum of one kind: it is nourished upon ideas and absorbs facts only as these are connected with the living ideas upon which they hang. {Vol. 6, p. 20}

It’s a tricky thing, balancing all these subjects and all the different possible uses of our time.

Let us remember that the goal of our education is to develop the child’s care and he cannot care about things with which he is wholly unfamiliar. Along the lines of Miss Mason’s words, our job is to bring the horse to water.