The amazing growth of classical Christian education in the US over the last 30 years is easy to explain: the culture is deteriorating around us. Public and private schools follow the broader culture, introducing fads and folly that would have horrified our ancestors. In the US, Protestant and Catholic Christianity once held the day in universities like Harvard and Yale, in public office, in media and news, in business and in public life. We believe that in this present darkness, the Orthodox Church is uniquely poised to be the good leaven that spreads throughout the culture and restores sanity, rationality, the pursuit of virtue, and genuine holiness. It all starts with one child, a teacher, and a quality curriculum.

Our mission statement is:

Serving the Holy Trinity under the guidance of the Holy Orthodox Church, our mission is to offer students an excellent classical Christian education, cultivating the love of God and of neighbor and empowering them to reach their God-given intellectual, spiritual, moral, and physical potential.

Comments on the mission statement:

• Our mission is to educate as a means of serving the Holy Trinity. This education is offered as a sacrifice to God, our ascesis, our gratitude for His love and our piety to steward His children.
• Our mission is guided in its ends and means by the Holy Orthodox Church: her canons, liturgies, practices, doctrines, teachings, traditions, icons. Our mother parish is under Antiochian jurisdiction, and so we reflect a particularly Antiochian culture led by His Eminence, Metropolitan Joseph. Our families hail from various parts of America, from Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Greece, and many other places all over the Orthodox world.
• An excellent education means that our faculty teach well, and students learn well. Students are invited to grow, not exasperated with too much challenge nor enervated with too little challenge. They learn to read good books well, to write beautiful thoughts well, to think clearly and deeply, to argue thoughtfully, to dialogue wisely, to disagree respectfully. Their sentiments are formed to love beauty and despise ugliness; to love order and truth; reject licentiousness and falsehood; to love goodness and fittingness, abhor wickedness and injustice.
• Classical Christian education means bequeathing our students the best that the past has to offer, both sacred and secular, both Greco-Roman and Christian. We hand over the whole inheritance of Western and Eastern civilization given to us.
• A classical education means forming our students’ gracefulness and piety through music, gymnastics, prayer, and obedience — even before they come to the age of reason.
• A classical education means teaching our students Greek and Latin languages, to read the “Great Books” (the classical canon), and to practice the liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
• A Christian education means complementing the work our students do in the Divine Liturgy and prayers throughout the week —  both corporate and private prayers, in catechism, and in the “little church” of the home.
• A Christian education means centering all of our learning on the person of Jesus Christ. We think “incarnationally” about everything, and teach our students to do so, not leaving theology, or study of the Holy Bible, or catechism, or ascetic labor confined to one particular class. We seek to become like Christ, to “put on Christ,” by learning to become like Christ, rather than simply to learn about Christ.

Motto

Our motto is Agape, Sophia, Chara. These three Greek words, translated into English, mean Love, Wisdom, Joy.  These virtues briefly encapsulate the kind of people we want to become and the kind of students we want to produce: loving, wise, and joyful Christian men and women.

Why these three?  Love is the highest theological virtue according to our Lord (Luke 10:27), St. Paul (1 Cor. 13:13), and the fathers of the Church. Wisdom is the highest cardinal virtue. And joy is one of the fruits of the spirit, and perhaps the one most unaccountable to the world.