Curriculum

We believe that classical education cultivates the human soul in ways that tests can never measure.

Key Characteristics and Components of Classical Teaching:

  • A school that uses technology effectively but without diminishing the faculty leadership that is crucial to academic achievement.
  • The centrality of the Western tradition in the study of history, literature, and philosophy.
  • A rich and recurring examination of the American literary, moral, philosophical, political, and historical traditions.
  • The use of explicit phonics instruction for the teaching of reading.
  • The teaching of Latin.
  • The acknowledgment of objective standards of correctness, logic, beauty, weightiness, and truth intrinsic to the liberal arts.
  • The school culture demanding moral virtue, decorum, respect, discipline, and studiousness among the students and faculty.
  • A curriculum that is content-rich.
  • A faculty where well-educated and articulate teachers explicitly convey real knowledge to students using traditional teaching methods rather than using so-called ‘student-based learning’.

At Livingston Classical Academy we serve students Kindergarten through 12th grade. It is our goal to educate youth on our nation’s founding principles and empower them, as free citizens, to pursue a virtuous life of happiness and excellence.

In the earliest grades, the curriculum focuses primarily on language, with the bulk of the school day given to teaching literacy and numeracy. Both subjects are foundational to a student’s education, so the resources and methods deployed in each case must be consistent and excellent. The Academy uses the Access Literacy program to teach literacy and related skills, and the Singapore Math Program to teach numeracy.

Why Do We Teach Latin?

Livingston Classical Academy teaches Latin to its students because it is beautiful! We want to give our students access to some of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known, and many of them recorded their ideas in Latin. While we want them to love Latin for its own sake, we also recognize a myriad of pragmatic reasons to pursue this discipline. Here are just a few of them:

  1. Latin teaches students to be attentive.
  2. Latin teaches students to love words. The precision of Latin provides students with a linguistic understanding that cannot be as thoroughly comprehended in their mother tongue. Using the right word, at the right time, and in the right context is empowered by the study of classical languages.
  3. Latin is a powerful vocabulary builder. Over 50% of English words come from Latin. One single Latin word may represent the roots of five to ten English words. By learning Latin prefixes and endings, as well as Latin roots, students are capable of comprehending many English words that they may not have previously studied.
  4. Training in Latin lays the foundation for learning other Latin-based (Romance) languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.
  5. For professional careers like medicine and law, Latin provides the base for many technical terms and names.
  6. Students who take 2 years of Latin score an average of 152 points higher on the SAT test.
  7. After one year of Latin, students have been shown to progress 4-12 months ahead of their peers in spelling, reading, vocabulary, science, history, and math problem solving.