Our pedagogical approach represents an utter commitment to fit with the nature of the human person. We take tradition as our teacher, and draw deeply on the classical, Catholic, and folk pedagogical streams which have come down to us, as well as the “Book of Nature” (St. Patrick) to bring us to an encounter with the Logos — and with it, good sense and “sanity” (John Senior). We take our commitment seriously enough to have structured our school’s institutional framework around it maximally facilitate our aim: the winning of young men over to the living of a good life.

This includes, for example, the offering of both the Manual Arts and Higher Studies tracks for finishing boys; an emphasis on physical fitness; and an exceptionally varied suite of teaching approaches employed on a weekly basis, e.g. 1-on-1 bi-weekly advising, small classes, dialogue-based team teaching followed by Q&A, Socratic class discussion, small group work, student presentation, hands-on learning such as machine building or repair work, and traditional classroom format. An additional approach which opens up to especially (but not only) 11th and 12th grade boys is the Oxford-style tutorial — by far the primary teaching format at Oxford (of course tutoring itself is of much more ancient and universal provenance than Oxford) — in which research-based written work meets high-level individualized discussion about their work on a weekly basis, and couches the learning process within a deeply human and relational basis of dialogue and exchange of ideas, and which relies on (as well as incentivizes) both parties to have “skin in the game”.