The Heights School provides a traditional liberal arts curriculum grounded in the western canon, the body of learning on which western civilization rests. By incorporating the many noble aspirations and developments of the modern world into this classical context, The Heights School strives to achieve the goal of the full human development of each student. The school motto, Crescite, is the Latin translation of the Creator’s first words to man, increase and grow. Indeed that divine command is the foundation of the Heights mission: to assist parents in the intellectual, moral, physical, and spiritual education of their sons.

 

A liberal arts curriculum is essential to this mission. The liberal arts have been traditionally grouped into two broad disciplines: the trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the quadrivium, consisting of astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic. At the Heights, these disciplines are represented by a core of courses in ten academic departments: English, Mathematics, Classics, History, Religion, Science, Spanish, Art, Computers, and Music. While a liberal arts education is an excellent preparation for many professions, its chief value is not its practical utility but rather that it contributes to living a more noble human life. A liberal arts education imparts the freedom necessary to rise above one’s current cultural situation to contemplate the great human realities that matter most in our lives: the meaning of suffering, the possibility of authentic love, truth, beauty, and even eternity. A liberal arts education would properly be pursued for its own sake even if it were not useful for another end.

 

Because the chief reason to pursue a liberal arts education is for its human and formative value, The Heights School seeks to enter into a partnership with families who share this vision of education. We rely on parents who are fully activated primary educators to pass on the riches of a liberal education to the next generation. It is impossible for even the best school to accomplish this by itself without the support of parents working to establish a home where such an education can be fostered as well.  Our dedication to the traditional liberal arts and to the faculty/parent partnership exists in each the Lower, Middle and Upper Schools.  Please explore the individual pages of the schools to better understand the nuances of their approaches.