Veritas Academy educates students in the sixth through twelfth grades.  From the seminar to the science lab, from the music room to the playing field, we begin with the conviction that all human beings can know truth, create beauty and practice goodness.  To that end, we expect students to develop basic tools of learning, ordered basic knowledge, moral seriousness, breadth and depth of imagination, artistic ability and sensitivity, and a sense of wonder.  We believe all students should be immersed in the best our tradition has to offer. We believe all students can be active and useful participants in the ongoing and enduring conversation that is a vibrant civilization. We believe all students can be formed in a habitual vision of greatness that makes lifelong learners of the doctor and the mechanic, the housewife and the professor.   Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher, described education as a human awakening.  The goal of Veritas is to develop young men and women who are fully human and fully awake to the world.

Veritas Academy is a community of learners.  It is anchored by the teachers' own passion for learning.  Learning is a life-long human endeavor and the faculty is committed to pursuing knowledge for its own sake.   This pursuit of knowledge is promoted by faculty seminars in which all faculty members, regardless of their areas of expertise, study different disciplines together.  The community of learners manifests itself in the school day as teachers invite students to participate in discussions about the subject matter.  Although there will be days in which the teacher must lecture and the students must take notes, the culture of Veritas is to encourage students to think about what they are learning and to respond with their own insights.

Veritas Academy stands in the tradition of these successful schools:  Trinity Schools and Tempe Preparatory Academy.  It has hired Academy Project, a nonprofit education corporation located in Falls Church, Virginia, to provide both the curriculum and ongoing faculty training.  Academy Project is headed by Andrew Zwerneman, the current Head of School for Trinity School at Meadow View and one of the founding Heads of School for Tempe Preparatory Academy.

We expect each student to display mastery in history, mathematics, science, literature, and English, as well as to gain familiarity with at least one other language and rudiments of the fine arts.  To that end, students will follow a common academic core curriculum which includes seven years of history, mathematics, science, writing, literature, and foreign language (four years of Latin, three years of modern language).  Students also will take four years of drawing and painting, five years of music, and two years of drama.

Veritas Academy is founded on the Western intellectual tradition, which, more than any other, has shaped, and continues to shape, the United States of America.  From the solid foundation the Academy provides, students will be both capable of, and free to, explore other world traditions.

To foster the active involvement of each student, Veritas will offer these distinctive features:  class sizes of twenty students or fewer, single-sex classrooms, and the use, whenever possible, of original texts and documents rather than textbooks.  Courses will be performance-based - through the use of seminars, frequent writing exercises, and performances in the arts.

-        Small class size:  This allows faculty to know each student and to offer him or her personal attention.  The student cannot easily avoid participation and will be encouraged to become the primary agent in his or her education.

-        Single-sex classes:  Research supports the understanding that boys and girls learn best in single-sex classrooms.  It is well known, and confirmed in over twenty years of experience at Trinity Schools, that boys and girls learn in quite different ways.  In a single-sex setting, Veritas will be able to use approaches and strategies that complement those differences.  The single-sex classroom also avoids the documented sexism of the co-ed classroom, frees boys and girls from the distraction of the presence of the opposite sex in the classroom, and generates a high degree of personal confidence and freedom.

-        Original Texts, Socratic Seminars, and Colloquia:  Seminar classes are central to the Veritas experience and are offered in the upper grades.  In seminar, students read original texts.  Commentaries, introductions, reviews, or summaries are not allowed.   They will deal directly with the thoughts and words of the author, not with the ideas of some other reader or expert.  In seminar, the action always remains with the students.  The faculty member does not lecture, but rather leads the discussion.

-        A Performance-Based Program:  In the arts program, all students will play an orchestral instrument, sing in the choir, and compose music.  In the visual arts, they will paint and draw.  In drama, they will act.  In seminar, they will discuss and write.  In mathematics and science, they will solve problems and be engaged in experimentation.

Although the program will be rigorous, Veritas welcomes students of ordinary ability as well as the very brightest.  As Mortimer Adler cogently argues in The Paideia Proposal,

        Those who think [a common, core curriculum like Veritas's] cannot be successfully followed by all children fail to realize that the children of whom they are thinking have never had their minds challenged by requirements such as these.  It is natural for children to rise to meet higher expectations; but only if those expectations are set before them, and made both reasonable and attractive.

Our conviction, bolstered by the successes of Trinity Schools and Tempe Preparatory Academy with students of varying abilities, is that all young men and women can rise to the challenge of becoming members of a community of learners like that of Veritas Academy.

Veritas Academy expects to open in Fall 2009.