The curriculum is an authoritative prescription for the course of study of a school or system of schools. In their traditional form, such prescriptions set out the content to be covered at a grade level or in a course or sequences of courses, along with recommended or prescribed methods of teaching. In their contemporary form such prescriptions have been re-presented as national and state standards, outlining outcomes to be achieved by schools without prescribing the specific bodies of content to be covered or methods of teaching to be used.

However, most scholars who evaluate these curricula do not believe that direct the work of schools in significant ways. Curricula-as-documents are more often than not developed after the fact, and are based on existing practices of teachers or a simple listing of the content of textbooks being used. Further, many teachers are not familiar with the curriculum their district has mandated.

One particularly puzzling problem that plagued junior high schools and continues to plague middle schools is what Samuel H. Popper termed being “a school without teachers”. Because of the lack of teacher education programs and licensure that focus on the middle school level, the majority of young adolescents are taught by teachers who prepared for a career as an elementary or high school teacher. Fewer than one in four middle-grades teachers have received specialized training to teach at the middle level before they begin their careers. As a result, teachers who wind up teaching in middle schools, even those who discover that they enjoy teaching middle school students, find themselves woefully unprepared to work with this age group.

The following are traditions that are handed down from class to class at some of the private schools around the country.

From Woodberry Forest School, Woodberry Forest, Virginia

Honor System - “When you first visit Woodberry, you may be surprised to find books, jackets, and scooters left around campus while their owners take care of other business. When the boys return, their items will still be there. That is because of our legendary honor system, which prohibits lying, cheating, and stealing. The honor system is not an empty pledge at Woodberry. It is a way of life and a means for educating students about what it means to be honorable men.”

From McCallie School, Chattanooga, Tennessee

The Origin of the Senior Leadership Name - “In 1907, following the trend of other prep schools, McCallie students and faculty created a number of nonsensical cheers. The most popular was: Keo, Kio, Sis, Boom Zee; Meo, Mio, Rah, Rah, Rea; Zipity, Zapaty, Zee, Zum, Zee; McCallie, McCallie, McCall-ee. This cheer was the inspiration behind the naming of the senior leadership organization Keo-Kio.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE) is a three-hour admission test for entrance into grades five through twelve. The ISEE has three levels: a Lower Level for students currently in grades four and five who are candidates for admission to grades five and six, a Middle Level for students in grades six and seven who are candidates for admission to grades seven and eight, and an Upper Level for students in grades eight to eleven who are candidates for admission to grades nine through twelve.

Q: How much is the test?
A: The online or mail-in registration fee for the ISEE is $78. There is an additional charge of $20 for phone or fax registration.

Q: Are walk-in tests available?
A: Yes, walk-in registration is available at a limited number of test sites and dates. Walk-in registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and cannot be assured due to limitations on test materials and staff. There is an additional $30 fee for this service. If you are a candidate for walk-in registration, you must call the test site directly to see if you can be accommodated. If so, you must bring the following to the test site:
• a completed Registration Form. • the test fee plus the additional $30 (check, Visa, MasterCard or American Express).

Note: Test site supervisors will not accept cash and scoring will be delayed if your Registration Form has not been properly completed. Allow two extra working days for score reports and telephone reports.

Q: Can I make changes to my registration?
A: Yes, contact the Operations Office at 1-800-446-0320 immediately to make any changes to your submitted form. Some changes, such as rescheduling a test date, may result in additional fees. Check the ISEE Student Guide for more complete information.

Q: Where is the test offered?
A: The test is offered in over thirty metropolitan areas across the country. The list of testing dates and locations is found in the ISEE Student Guide available through the school to which the student is applying or online.

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The Secondary School Admission Test, or SSAT, is an admissions test administered to students in grades 5-11 to help determine placement into independent or private junior high and high schools. Despite its similarities, the SSAT is not related to the SAT Reasoning test and is not administered by the College Board.

There are two levels of the test: the Lower level for students in grades 5-7 and the Upper level, designed for students in grades 8-11. The SSAT consists of two parts: a brief essay and a multiple choice test that includes Mathematics, Reading Comprehension and Verbal sections. In all, there are five sections.

The test, written in English, is primarily administered in the United States and Canada at various test centers, which usually are independent schools. However, there are also test centers worldwide.

Reference and picture credits.

Cate School, established in 1910 by Curtis Wolsey Cate, is a four-year, coeducational, college-preparatory boarding school in Carpinteria, California, United States.

In addition to an academic curriculum that features a combined thirty-eight Advanced Placement (AP) offerings and honors courses, all students participate in an extracurricular program that includes athletics, drama, music, dance, community service, and an extensive outdoor program. The class size averages between ten and twelve students.

The student body of 265 students (83 percent are boarders) comes from twenty-three states and thirteen countries and is both academically talented and diverse.

Some Quick Facts:

Cate’s student body is recognized as much for its talent—academic, artistic, and athletic—as it is for its warmth and vitality.

Admission

> Inquiries received yearly for admission: 2,000
> Interviews conducted yearly for admission: 450
> Applications submitted yearly for admission: 450
> New students enrolled yearly: 75-80
> General median SSAT total percentile of new students: 80th

Student Body

> Total students: 265 (220 boarders / 45 day)
> Boarding students from outside California: 43%
> Boarding students from abroad: 19%
> Students of color: 41%
> Students who receive need-based financial aid: Almost 30%
> Financial aid allocated for 2006/2007: $2,000,000
> Foreign Nations represented in student body (by home address): England, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Macau, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand
> States represented in student body (by home address): AK, AZ, CA, CO, CT, ID, IL, LA, MA, MD, MT, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, TX, UT, VA, WA

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Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend’s mom with a baseball and believes–accurately–that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.

John Irving’s novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O’Connor’s work.

Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen’s orphaned best friend), the rough comedy.

The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school’s marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it’s all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, “fun with a purpose.” When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn’t cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred.

The book’s countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy–from Vietnam to the Contras.

To read more reviews about the book, please click here.
To know more about the author, please click here.

Phillips Academy (also known as Phillips Andover or P.A. or simply Andover) is a co-educational University preparatory school for boarding and day students in grades 9-12. The school is located in Andover, Massachusetts, north of Boston.

Phillips Academy is the oldest continuously running incorporated boarding school in the United States, established in 1778 by Samuel Phillips, Jr. Phillips Academy’s endowment stood around $670 million on June 30, 2006, the third-highest of any American secondary school.

The academy traditionally educated its students for Yale (and to a lesser extent, Harvard and Amherst), but students now matriculate to a wide range of colleges and universities.

Among other notable alumni, Andover has educated two American Presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, four Medal of Honor recipients, inventor Samuel Morse, and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The Phillipian, the school’s student-run newspaper, is the oldest secondary school newspaper in the US. Likewise, the Philomathean Society is the oldest high school debate society in the nation, established in 1825.

Reference and picture credits. 

Probably one of the most influential films about the boarding school industry is Dead Poets Society.

Dead Poets Society is an 1989 Academy Award-winning film directed by Peter Weir. Set in 1959 at a conservative and autocratic boys prep school, it tells the story of an English professor who inspires his students to change their lives of conformity through his teaching of poetry and literature.

The story is set at the fictional Welton Academy in Vermont and was filmed at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware. The script was written based on the author’s life at Montgomery Bell Academy, an all boys preparatory school in Nashville, Tennessee. A novelization by Nancy H. Kleinbaum (ISBN 0553282980) based on the movie’s script has also been published.

Whether you consider the movie a commentary, entertainment or reality, it certainly made an impact. If you are curious about how boarding schools are portrayed around that time, it is recommended that you get hold of film’s copy.

Reference and picture credits. 

Curious about what respected historical icons think about quality education? Read on and be inspired.

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
~ Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher; prominent classical liberal political theorist; and sociological theorist.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
~ H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells (September 21, 1866 – August 13, 1946), better known as H. G. Wells, was a prolific English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

One can never consent to creep when one feels the compulsion to soar.
~ Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to graduate from college.

What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.
~ John Holt

John Caldwell Holt (April 14, 1923 - September 14, 1985) was an American author and educator, one of the best known proponents of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
~ Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), also known as T.R., was the twenty-sixth President of the United States, and a leader of the Republican Party and of the Progressive Movement. He became the youngest President in United States history at the age of 42.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.
~ Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
~ Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (Can) (30 November 1874–24 January 1965) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army. A prolific author, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his own historical writings.

Quotes Source. Biography Reference.