The Culture of Great Hearts

The unique culture that you find at any Great Hearts Academy is much more than just a series of buzzwords found in a handbook.  It is a significant part of our DNA and what makes our schools intentionally stand out from the rest.  It is our exceptional culture that makes our academies enticing for a new generation of learners and their families who are looking for more depth in education.

Great Hearts Co-founder and Academies Officer Dr. Daniel Scoggin understands the importance of human connection as the basis for the culture at Great Hearts.  “The culture we strive to foster in our academies is based in sincere friendships around what is of enduring value: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” said Scoggin.  “We are drawn to our best selves and our best relationships with one another when we share a common pursuit of human excellence.”

Let’s explore some of the key aspects of the culture that we strive to create at Great Hearts (excerpt from The Philosophical Pillars of a Great Hearts Academy):

• A Great Hearts school has a unified, coherent, and intentional culture. Individual classrooms are not spaces for private cultures that are detached from the community of the school.
• Our school culture is a reflective space in which students can study the high culture of the West free from the distractions of pop culture and postmodern media.
• In keeping with our belief that habits of personal order cultivate habits of intellectual order, faculty performance is grounded in thoughtful and well-planned lessons, orderly classrooms, timely and meaningful evaluation/correction of student work, Socratic engagement of students, and attentive performance of assigned campus duties.
• The nine core virtues that we seek to model and instill in our lower school students are: humility, integrity, friendship, perseverance, wisdom, courage, responsibility, honesty, and citizenship.
• We let the Great Books speak for themselves and we never assign secondary literature (that is, scholarly treatments of a primary work) to students. The great literature of the past need not be re-narrated through contemporary editions in order to achieve relevancy. Great literature is timeless and both student and teacher must be drawn up into the text, rather than bringing the text down to them.
• We study our Western heritage and believe that our cultural inheritance is unique and primary to us by virtue of our being Americans. We believe that in order for students to become culturally literate citizens they must share certain specific knowledge based in the study of the humanities, the sciences, and the fine arts.
• The most polarizing debates of contemporary politics and culture must be kept out of our faculty offices and classrooms. Our students should see and know us as citizens of the West, united by our love of what we teach and learn together.
• A vibrant athletic department, and the competitive aspiration, physical health, and camaraderie of our students, is an essential complement to our academic communities.
• Sarcasm, bad will, and apathy are toxic to the work of teaching and learning.

Do you have a story or know of a story that you would like to see featured at Great Hearts?  Please contact jmoore@greatheartsamerica.org.