Welcome!

It is my privilege to welcome you to Columbus Classical Academy.

We are honored and humbled by your interest in our school and grateful that you have considered entrusting us with the education of your children. It is a solemn and wonderful charge to impart to students the knowledge and virtue upon which responsible and joyful lives are built. Whether or not you ever enroll your child at CCA, we welcome you to explore our school and to inquire with us at any time.

Columbus Classical Academy is a Hillsdale College Curriculum School, utilizing Hillsdale’s world-class and distinctively American, classical curriculum. Because we recognize that all education is both immanently personal and at the same time inherently social and political, students receive an education befitting not only a human being, but also an American citizen.

The Hillsdale curriculum is rigorous, integrated, and sequential, grounded in the liberal arts and sciences and the Western canon. Every child studies literature, mathematics, history, civics, the natural sciences, Latin, the fine arts, physical education, and philosophy. These disciplines are taught using time-tested, teacher-led pedagogical methods, which include rigorous phonics instruction, explicit grammar lessons, and memorization and recitation. Instruction is complemented by the use of manipulatives in the teaching of arithmetic at the earliest grades. Handwriting and cursive lessons in written expression, use of the Socratic method, and close and critical reading of the classics and primary source texts are employed as students mature. At the conclusion of their time at CCA, students will possess a broad and deep body of knowledge about their world, their culture, their nation, and themselves.

But CCA is more than just an academic institution. It is also a place of moral formation, where virtue is modeled, practiced, honored, and expected. We maintain that there are objective, moral laws to which all are accountable, and that without knowledge of the good and a desire to pursue it, man can be neither virtuous nor truly free. Our embrace of the classical virtues points us beyond ourselves to what is eternally significant, recognizing as did our nation’s founders that: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

That proper, formal schooling is good and necessary, however, does not alone make it sufficient to the life of man. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. And because we at CCA hold that natural bond and relationship in high esteem, you will know what your children are learning, and your input on how best to engage and inspire them will be encouraged. Even more, your commitment to supporting and nurturing their moral and academic development at home will be essential. We are only a part of the task that is raising mature, joyful, responsible adults. We cannot do our part without you.

As an institution, Columbus Classical Academy is not yet a year old. But as an idea, as a philosophy of education, as “the real community of man, . . . of the potential knowers,” as Allan Bloom describes it, our school is more than 2,300 years old. We invite you to join us in the Great Conversation, to partner with us in passing down our incomparable cultural, religious and political inheritance to the next generation, and to pursue lives of knowledge and virtue together.

Welcome to Columbus Classical Academy. Veritas et Virtus.

—Daniel C. Gibson