How We See It and How We Do It

We strive to provide an inclusive, immersive, positive, forward-thinking learning environment that honors, celebrates, and values the interests, desires, and goals of each individual student, of all ages, as well as the home cultures, languages, beliefs, and individual needs and abilities of all students. Our vision and mission is that every student matures naturally and authentically as a free, healthy, and happy human being, and to the extent desired, participating in, shaping, and renewing our world.

Our academy honors, cherishes, and advocates for each and every student. We receive each child with reverence, educate them with love, and send them forth as adults in freedom.

Teachers and students learn and grow together in communities of inquiry and enterprise. Everyone participates in the ways they believe are best for themselves and for their learning community. Parents are important, too, and are encouraged to become involved and play important roles in our learning center and unschool community. Our academy operates independently and is governed democratically by teachers and students. Parents participate as well, in some ways more directly and in other ways through their attending students.

Everyone learns by doing, or by doing what they want. Teaching and learning focus on project-based, problem-based, objective-based, inquiry-based, and other hands-on, important, useful, meaningful, and relevant real world situations, applications, questions, and ideas. Everyone becomes fully immersed in the work they do, to the extent they wish to do so, and this includes exploration and free-play. Everyone applies, in a practical way, the things they learn conceptually. All learning has a purpose - a purpose for today, not just for an elusive and distant future. In this way, purposeful learning is practiced, is repeated, is deepened, and so it sticks.

Although we are a private 501(c)3 learning environment, we are not an elite school. All children have a right to the highest quality education, and we offer that highest quality education to all children. We welcome - and recruit - children of every cultural, racial, ethnic, national, religious, social, class, and socioeconomic background, as well as of every gender, identity, and ability level.

Although we must charge tuition, our organization is committed, over time, to creating a self-funding model that will rely on a combination of donors (endowments), investments, and profits from our own and partnered business enterprises that will enable an even more significant population of less-wealthy families, families with many children, and traditionally socioeconomically marginalized children and youth to attend the academy at no cost or with substantive financial assistance.