Our Educational Approach

MCA implements a coherent curriculum that systematically builds knowledge and skills across all grades.

What is a "Classical" Education?

How to Think, Not What to Think

By classical education, we refer to the type of education developed and passed down through centuries, from the ancient Greeks, to our Founding Fathers. Classical education describes the time-tested curricula, materials, methods, and aims traditionally used to educate our youth, and serve to build and preserve our Western civilization. This liberal-arts tradition includes teaching objective standards, the instillation of real knowledge, and instruction in moral character and civic virtue. Classical schools seek to cultivate virtuous habits of thought and action in order to orient students’ minds and affections.

The time-tested classical model achieves these aims through a curriculum that emphasizes the histories, literary works, and achievements that shaped our society and inform our understanding of what it is to live a meaningful life. It challenges students to master the works and subject matters of Western civilization’s greatest thinkers. In the true and original sense of the liberal arts, it provides an education that is fitting for free men and women, and that fits them to be free. It prepares youth to become flourishing individuals capable of personal self-governance. It fortifies the foundations for political self-governance in our Republic, so that future generations may profit from its strength and longevity.

The TRIVIUM (or how to learn) is in three parts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric

01 GRAMMAR: "The first years of schooling are called the 'grammar stage'--not because you spend four years doing English, but because these are the years in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid, just as grammar is the foundation for language. In the elementary-school years...the mind is ready to absorb information. Since children at this age actually find memorization fun, during this period education involves not primarily self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts and training in basic thinking skills: rules of phonics and spelling and how how to use them, rules of grammar and understanding good sentence structure, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, how numbers work and the basics of mathematical thinking."

02 LOGIC: "Somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, children begin to think more analytically, middle-school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking, 'Why?' The second phase of the classical education, the 'logic stage,' is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships among different fields of knowledge, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework. A student is ready for the logic stage when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, the student begins the study of algebra and applies mathematical reasoning to real-life situations. She studies the rules of logic, and begins to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and support of a thesis; the logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information; the logic of history demands that the student find out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its story; the logic of science requires the child to learn and apply the scientific method." 

03 RHETORIC: "The final phase of a classical education, the 'rhetoric stage,' builds on the first two. At this point, the high-school student learns to write and speak with force and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses her conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language. The student also begins to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts her; these are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships, and other forms of specialized training."

Core Knowledge Sequence

Singapore Math

Structured Literacy

Latin

Specialty Programs