Our Curriculum

Atlanta Classical Academy's curriculum exists to fulfill the school’s mission of developing young men and women in knowledge and virtue who possess the tools for good thinking and the habits necessary for living a happy life. 

We approach education as human formation instead of simply covering material or transferring information, and so we attend to our students’ hearts and intellects together. We believe that education is never morally neutral. It necessarily changes the student. The question is how. 

“Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Our curriculum consists of excellent works that have withstood the test of time. We do not claim to cover the entirety of all the best things, but anything we put in front of our students is from the category—or class—of what is best, and therefore, engaged with what is most human about us. We teach the great books, believing that a love of these books and conversations about them change us as human beings. We present math and science as not merely a means to technical acumen or job preparation, but as a kind of language for understanding the order of the universe.

In short, we provide a liberal arts education, that is, an education befitting a free person. We work from a three-phased conception of the trajectory of education–known traditionally as the trivium–that consists of a progression from grammar through logic to rhetoric within each subject. An ACA education culminates in the rhetoric stage when a senior presents and defends an original thesis before a committee of faculty and an audience of family and community members.