School Calendar
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July 2009 |
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2009 - 2010 School Year Registration We are now accepting online applications for the 2009 - 2010 school year.
Welcome to Glendale Preparatory Academy Glendale Preparatory Academy is a state-chartered public school offering a liberal arts education rooted in the western literary and philosophic tradition, and committed to the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. Our academy embraces wisdom and virtue as the proper ends of education, and our school culture is ordered to help foster great-hearted young men and women. Glendale Prep’s rigorous seven year curriculum culminates in a four year sequence of Humane Letters seminars in which our students read, contemplate, and discuss the Great Books from Plato’s Republic to Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Please take a few moments to read the following overview of our school mission. The founding of a new school within the liberal arts tradition All of us – students, parents, faculty, and administration – are engaged in a noble endeavor this year: the opening of a new school that takes its place within the venerable tradition of liberal arts education. At Glendale Prep, we are indeed doing something new, beginning a new school with the inauguration of a new faculty and new student body. Yet we are also inheritors of something old, a cultural tradition whose literary roots date back to the epics of Homer in the eighth century B.C. Though we are aware that some believe a liberal arts curriculum to be irrelevant or out-of-date, we study together at Glendale Prep with the conviction that precisely the opposite is the case: our curriculum is most relevant because it addresses students in all the depth and breadth of their humanity. We ask the perennial questions that remain at the heart of human life: “What constitutes a just society? How do I lead a good life? What is man’s place in the world?” Rather than being irrelevant, a liberal arts education is acutely, dramatically relevant to the formation of the character of our students through their growth in wisdom and virtue. With them, the faculty will study that which is most enduring in human culture, and will do so with the conviction that reading, writing, and discourse within the context of community can lead us all toward those aspects of being that the tradition refers to as the Transcendentals, namely the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. A rigorous curriculum in a community of friends The curriculum of Glendale Prep is challenging and all courses are taught at an honors level. Students begin the study of Latin in 6th grade, take two years of calculus, read and discuss authors such as Aristotle and Dante, and write a senior thesis. This course of study is not for everyone, but any student who has the desire to know and the willingness to work hard can find a home at Glendale Prep. Not all students will get “A” grades, but every student will have the opportunity to learn and grow. At our academy, this learning and growth takes place in a community of friends, a community formed through solidarity in the pursuit of academic and athletic excellence, as well as growth in moral character. Faculty, staff, and parents work daily to assist our students in realizing the fullness of their human, cultural, and personal identity. As beneficiaries of this formation, our graduates will have the character to serve the larger community through the preservation and development of our local and national culture. 
David M. Williams Headmaster of Glendale Preparatory Academy Liberal Education The Latin term “liber” means “free,” and a liberal education is one that embraces free thought. Though there are many ways in which one might characterize the school, our foremost goal is the provision of a liberal education. Our students work hard and might sometimes feel constrained by the obligations that such work entails, but the end result of such work is truly liberating, and a liberal education is the most noble pursuit available to a citizen of a free society that has institutionalized the values of individual freedom, free speech, and free elections. In such a society, a liberal education is indispensable. Great BooksDr. Mortimer Adler, a chief architect of the curriculum and canon behind our approach, spoke of three key criteria for including a book on the “great books” list: the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times; the book is inexhaustible -- it can be read again and again with benefit; the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries. In his book The Six Great Ideas, Dr. Adler identified truth, goodness, beauty, justice, liberty, and equality as key among the ideas that have characterized the great works of the Western tradition. Throughout our course of study, students return to those great ideas and works that have shaped the culture in which we live and have the power to shape our understanding of ourselves and the human condition. Core Curriculum As you know, there are virtually no electives at Glendale Prep. All students have the opportunity to explore a full range of subjects, some of which will surprise them. Students often find that they enjoy a subject much more than they’d expected to, sometimes find that they are better at a subject than they had expected to be, and occasionally find a subject more challenging than they had expected. In any event, every student is sure to find his horizons broadening as he delves into areas that he would have left unexplored, given the opportunity only to indulge the whims of inexperience. Socratic MethodThose who have read the dialogues of Plato and who have attended a Humane Letters seminar will have noticed that the two differ in some ways. Their common feature, though, is their emphasis on inquiry as the device through which ideas are explored. A key idea or assignment might require that the teacher present material to the class, but the forward progress of the class through the ideas it explores is driven by the questions that the teacher asks of the students, the answers that they give, and the further questions that those answers inspire. In that sense, then, the school certainly follows a Socratic model.Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful. --Leo Strauss 1899-1973 Uniforms The uniforms that students wear at Glendale Prep are intended as constant reminders to the students that we do not derive our identity from what we wear; rather, we derive it from what we believe, say, and do. In a similar sense, then, the school itself derives its identity from the beliefs and actions that form its mission and identity, rather than from its buildings and façade, which speaks only in a very limited way about who we really are, what we really are, as a school.
Non-discrimination policy: Glendale Preparatory Academy is a not-for-profit, publicly-funded charter school and does not discriminate in its enrollment or hiring practices on the basis of gender, race, religion, national origin or disability. |
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