True North Classical Academy provides the highest level of education in the classical tradition.
The first classical school in Miami, True North is part of a growing community of classical schools that are frequently found on the lists of the best schools in the country. True North provides our students with a superior academic experience and moral development in a tuition-free public charter school that previously was only available in exclusive private schools.
True North Classical Academy combines a classical education with a school culture of excellence to create a school in which our students grow to become courageous leaders, virtuous critical thinkers, confident speakers, and competent writers.
Mission & Vision
True North Classical Academy will achieve its vision through a rigorous, content-rich curriculum grounded in the tradition of the classical liberal arts. Through steadfast focus on scholarship, citizenship, and leadership in an environment that values and models intellectual and moral virtue, we are committed to empowering our students to reach their highest potential and sustain a lifelong love of learning.
True North Classical Academy will inspire a thirst for knowledge within our students, aligning passion to purpose in the pursuit of the True, Good, and Beautiful.
Classical Education
Rooted in the history of Western thought and learning, the classical education model is built on the three stages of learning in the liberal arts.
Grammar: The study of basic forms
Logic: The skill of abstracting from particulars
Rhetoric: The ability to speak and write persuasively
In each subject, our dedicated faculty guide our students’ journey through these stages, mastering the subject’s basic facts, developing the ability to reason clearly about them, and finally possessing the capability to argue and support ideas creatively and persuasively. The results is students who understand critical concepts, synthesize their learning from across subjects, and apply that knowledge in purposeful and persuasive ways.
Culture
Walking through the halls of True North Classical Academy you feel it: the air of calm and purpose that comes from a focus on building a culture of excellence.
That culture is grounded in two core principles:
- All children – regardless of socio-economic status — should have access to the highest-quality education that typically reserved only for the brightest or wealthiest in our society.
- Every member of our school community holds each other to high expectations in our collective pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, grounded in timeless moral principles.
At True North Classical Academy, our students receive an academically excellent education and moral development through the rigorous study of our virtues: courage, moderation, justice, friendship, responsibility, prudence, and wisdom. Our unique school culture encourages students to pursue good things for their own sake and to seek honors only when those honors are worth pursuing.
Curriculum
At the heart of True North Classical Academy’s academic achievement is the powerful and simple truth of Core Knowledge: the more you know, the more you are able to learn.
The Core Knowledge sequence is predicated on two realizations:
- Student’s ability to learn a new concept depends on what they already know
- What students know is a function of previous experience and teaching
These insights, well-established by cognitive science, has profound implications for teaching and learning. At True North, we understand that the sequence in which new concepts are taught is just as important as the scope of our curriculum.
Grammar (K-5)
We develop the essential building blocks for higher levels of cognitive work by engaging our student’s natural desires to explore their world. Students take pleasure in memorization while chanting the historical people and events as well as famous poems and prose. Through instruction and memorization, we also ensure our students master the rules of phonics and grammar, understand foundational math facts, and are familiar with the basic elements of the natural sciences.
Logic (6-8)
Students apply the rules of grammar learned in the previous stage to the skills of reasoning, questioning, and arguing in a way that seeks what is true. Students are no longer satisfied with memorized facts, they want to know the why that lies behind the what. Instruction shifts to the Socratic Method of teaching in which students are encouraged to ask questions and follow them to their logical conclusion
Rhetoric (9-12)
Once a student mastered the structure of language through grammar and how to logically apply what they know, they are ready synthesize information and clearly articulate their understanding in a persuasive way. Students become self-motivated and self-correcting learners and are able to express themselves with clarity, depth, and originality. Since the goal of a classical education is the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, those who excel in this art are able to lead others to these noble ends.
