At Chatt Classical, academic excellence includes habits as well as content. Students are expected to practice attention, memory, imitation, precision, perseverance, discussion, revision, wonder, and intellectual courage. Students are expected to read real books and write with their hands.

We want students to engage in a scholar’s work with gusto, asking good questions, receiving correction, and making careful distinctions. This work requires diligence, but it returns satisfaction, wonder, and delight.

Classrooms are intended to be lively places of shared inquiry: teachers modeling intellectual discipline and delight, students learning from one another’s questions, with the challenge of shared work strengthening both learning and friendship.

Writing and speaking are central to Chatt Classical’s academic program. Students learn that words are not merely tools for self-expression; they are instruments for truth, charity, inquiry, worship, and public life.

As students mature, they move from narration, imitation, memory work, and careful sentence formation toward composition, argument, analysis, disputation, and formal presentation with the help of the progymnasmata. They learn to write clearly, debate wisely, persuade justly, and foster civil dialogue.

Upper school students will engage in significant public academic work, including seminar discussion, formal debate, persuasive speech, thesis writing, oral defense, and presentations that require both intellectual preparation and public courage.

Chatt Classical values academic achievement, but we do not reduce student flourishing to grades, rankings, or test scores. We look for students who are becoming careful readers, precise thinkers, persuasive speakers, diligent workers, and joyful learners.

Our primary academic accommodation is correct course placement. An academic assessment will be required for admission and/or appropriate course placement so that students can enter the level of work where they can be challenged fruitfully and supported honestly.

Assessment at CCA should help students grow. It should reveal what students know, what they misunderstand, how well they can use what they have learned, and where further practice is needed. CCA also commits to sharing student mastery narrative portraits with families to describe a student’s growth.

Chatt Classical’s curriculum embodies the school’s classical Christian mission. Students will encounter historic texts, primary sources, Scripture, poetry, speeches, biographies, maps, art, music, catechetical and theological materials, classical language resources, and mathematical and scientific writing. This, the Western intellectual tradition, is thoroughly taught, not only “because it is ours, but because it is the tradition that has produced the greatest degree of freedom, justice, and self-determination,” in the words of Louis Markos.

Sample or representative resources may include:

• Scripture and Theology: the Bible, catechisms, creeds, church history, hymns, and selected theological readings

• Literature and Great Books: Homer, Aesop, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Augustine, Dante, Lewis, Tolkien, Bronte, Tolstoy, Eliot, and more

• History and Humanities: primary sources, timelines, maps, biographies, speeches, historical narratives, and site visits

• Latin: introductory Latin texts, grammar exercises, chants, translation practice, and Latin prayers, hymns, and copywork

• Mathematics: thoughtfully sequenced in coordination with logic and science studies and presented in their historical and philosophical contexts

• Natural Science: observation journals, nature study, laboratory work, scientific method, physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, and primary-source scientific readings where appropriate

• Writing and Rhetoric: copywork, narration, dictation, imitation, composition, progymnasmata exercises, debate, formal speeches, essays, and thesis work

These examples are not meant as a final or exhaustive curriculum list. They represent the kind of academic materials CCA will seek: texts and tools that are rich, orderly, humane, robust, and worthy of sustained attention.

Chatt Classical does not define education narrowly as test or college preparation, job training, or credential gathering. Nevertheless, students formed by liberal learning, virtuous habits, disciplined study, clear speech, mathematical precision, scientific attentiveness, and zeal for life will be well prepared for meaningful next steps, whatever those may be.

We want graduates who know how to learn, work, ask good questions, and speak with virtue. In an increasingly automated or fabricated age, we want our students to know how to discern truth and how to take responsibility for the opportunities before them.