Children’s education in their native culture is real empowerment, real belonging and real happiness. The alternative, the attempt to build a norm-free society of self-expressive individuals – the ideology of celebrity, where “everyone is special” – is a recipe for loneliness, meaninglessness, aimlessness, despair.

Students at the Calgary Classical Academy will develop an expansive moral vocabulary. They will learn to recognize and identify a variety of virtues, understand their varied manifestations, and use them as reminders of what is good and noble. Students will strive to embody these virtues in their own lives, both through habitual practice, and through active self-reflection. Following is a list of some of the virtues we hope to help nurture.

During periods of prolonged drought, African elephants wander herculean distances over the Savannah in search of water. Tracking the herds to monitor which of these elephants are successful, scientists have discovered a reliable way of predicting which groups will survive the prolonged droughts and which will not. The key variable they isolated was surprisingly simple: the age of the oldest female in the herd.

Humane explorations in geometry, mathematics, and sciences reveal the order and harmony of the cosmos, inspiring wonder, reverence, and humility. They allow us to recognize our own place as part of a larger whole, and illuminate how we can order our own lives in harmony with the laws governing nature.