Our Story

Group of diverse young people sitting side by side, looking ahead, at an indoor event or presentation, with a focus on a smiling boy with dark hair in the center.
A small green plant sprouting from soil inside an artful paper cup

A Long-Standing Reputation

Our Story

The Academy was founded in 1969, and for more than half a century it has kept faith with one conviction: that children are capable of far more than is commonly asked of them, and that asking it of them, among adults who know and respect each one, is a form of love. We remain small by design, about 115 students from Kindergarten through 8th Grade, so that every teacher knows every child.

What is a classical education?

‘Education must not simply teach work, it must teach Life.’
—W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Talented Tenth’ (1903)

‘I do not study to know more, but to be less ignorant.’
—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1691, translated from the Spanish

In the classical tradition, to be educated meant to master the branches of human learning. It also meant something further. The purpose of that learning was to understand oneself, one’s place in the world, and one’s responsibility to it, and knowledge was expected to take shape in a person’s life as right action. The formation of character was always the first purpose of education. We hold to that.

The tradition also understood that learning has an order. Children first gather the material: facts, vocabulary, the rules of grammar and arithmetic, the names of things. Then they learn to reason with it, and to ask whether a claim holds and why. Then they learn to say what they think clearly enough for another person to follow. The old names for these stages are grammar, logic and rhetoric. One cannot argue well about what one does not know, nor persuade anyone of an argument one cannot state.

At The Academy that order is laid across the years. In the Lower School, students memorize, practice and build: phonics and math facts, poems and songs, the history of California and the United States, and a modern language, French or Spanish, from Kindergarten on. In the Upper School the work turns to argument. Students read primary sources, sit in seminars where the teacher asks more than they tell, and begin Latin, which shows them the machinery beneath the language they have spoken all their lives. By 8th Grade they write essays that make a claim and defend it before readers who have studied the same page and may disagree.

We read whole books, from many times and places, since a summary teaches less than the thing itself. We teach subjects so that they speak to one another. And we attend always to the kind of person a student is becoming, which shows in how they meet a hard problem and how they treat the person beside them. Our approach to character is our approach to academics.


In the classroom
Our teachers ask questions. ‘How does the variable behave in this equation, and why?’ and ‘How did you behave in this situation, and why?’ differ only in their subject; the habit of inquiry is the same. A child who is questioned seriously, day after day, by an adult who respects them learns to weigh evidence, to hear a classmate’s objection, and to own what they conclude.

Small classes make this possible. In a room of twelve or sixteen, every student speaks, every idea is tested, and a child can risk being wrong among people who know them well.