Classical Approach — Our Lady of Mount Carmel School

“You can get all A’s and still flunk life.”

-Walker Percy

The classical liberal arts approach is a whole-person, student-centered education. The goal of our approach is to enchant children with learning such that they become eager to pursue it themselves, for the purpose of growing in wisdom and love for all that is good. We are distinctive from other schools in what we teach, how we teach, and why we teach.

Our curriculum is carefully designed to give students an encounter with the best of our rich intellectual and artistic heritage. We won’t waste their time on anything less.
We treasure the inestimable worth of literacy, so our students learn to read critically and for understanding. We know that self-expression is a cornerstone of contentment, so they learn to write well. We believe math is both beautiful and well within the reach of ordinary students, so we emphasize numeracy and facility with concepts all the way through algebra.
We also understand that there’s more to living well beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. Well-rounded people develop a robust appreciation for such worthy pursuits as music, art, drama, chess, gardening, and cooking, so we make room in our curriculum for all of it.
We are unconditionally student-centered, and our educational approach works in collaboration with children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development from pre-k through eighth grade.
For all ages, we emphasize inquiry and understanding. We don’t simply teach students the “right answers;” rather, we prepare them to ask the right questions.
We believe ordinary children are capable of the extraordinary; therefore, we introduce them directly to the greatest literary, scientific, mathematical, and artistic ideas of all time. Our students don’t read about Shakespeare — they read Shakespeare. They aren’t lectured about nuclear fission — in collaboration with their teacher and classmates, they figure out the concept of fission for themselves.
Our teachers serve as wise guides, eager to journey alongside their students towards greater discovery and understanding. Dedicated professionals with extensive classical preparation, they hail from diverse backgrounds and experiences, yet they are unanimous in their passion for student-centered teaching and lifelong learning.
Quite simply, we teach because we love our students. We believe education is a privileged calling that God has entrusted to us as individual teachers and a faculty as a whole.
In elementary school we prepare students to succeed in middle school, and in middle school we prepare them to succeed in high school. But for us, that’s not nearly enough.
We believe that from morning prayer to dismissal, school should be a delight and not a chore — a place students love to be, not a place they can’t wait to leave. We know each and every child deserves a joyful and purposeful education, and we can’t wait to get up every morning and offer it to them.