Rhetoric School

The upper school years are designed to deepen intellectual maturity, practical skill, spiritual formation, and personal responsibility. Rhetoric school students complete a rhetoric thesis and a practicum of their own design, giving them meaningful opportunities to pursue serious questions and draw on their well-developed work ethic. The capstone thesis experience helps students distinguish themselves not merely by grades or test scores, but by depth of thought, perseverance, craftsmanship, and mature judgment.

Chatt Classical’s upper school also supports students as they discern future callings. Students have access to college and career resources, spiritual direction, internships, leadership development, travel opportunities, civic engagement, and partnerships with local and national organizations. The goal is for graduates to be prepared for their next faithful step, whether that is college, a gap-year program, dignified work, an internship, or another worthy pursuit.

Upperclassmen are expected to contribute to the life of the school in these ways:

  • mentoring younger students, help shape student culture

  • leading clubs or initiatives

  • participating in chapel and community life

  • generating visible goods that bless the school and neighborhood

Their education is meant to produce young men and women who can think, speak, serve, build, cultivate, defend, nurture, and lead.

In a word, the function of eloquence in teaching is not to make people like what was once offensive, or to make them do what they were loth to do, but to make clear what was hidden from them.
– Augustine, On Christian Teaching

A woman in a pink, sequined gown dancing with a man and woman during a formal event or wedding reception, holding hands in a circle with other guests.

Rhetoric School Highlights

  • Opportunities for internships, travel, competitions, and partnerships beyond the classroom

  • A winter practicum designed and completed by the student

  • Participation in music, art, drama, athletics, outdoor pastimes, or other co-curricular pursuits

  • Senior class trip to Europe to experience first-hand the riches of the Western intellectual tradition and to learn to travel well

  • Student-designed and student-built projects, such as outdoor learning spaces, drama sets, campus features, and practical works of craftsmanship

  • Formation toward faithful adulthood, dignified work, wise leadership, and joyful responsibility

Students or teens or youth studying and reading the Bible at a wooden table.
Students in safety goggles conducting a science experiment in a classroom, wearing lab coats, and working with papers, test tubes, and scientific equipment on the table.

Those allowed to take part in arguments should be orderly and steady by nature,
not as nowadays, when uneven the unfit are allowed to engage in them.”

— Plato, Republic Book 7