Who we are as a school.
Who we are as a community.
Our Mission
The mission of Seven Oaks Classical School is to train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.
To this end, we seek to cultivate certain “pillars of character”: responsibility and respect, perseverance and courage, honesty and integrity, cooperation and citizenship. Teachers at Seven Oaks understand that it is their duty to talk about these and other virtues in their lessons and to model them with their lives. By teaching and practicing these virtues, we hope to prepare students for a life well-lived.
Our Partners
Hillsdale College
Seven Oaks Classical School is a Hillsdale College Member School. Seven Oaks is one of twenty schools across the country partnered with Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative. For more than 170 years, Hillsdale College has been a champion of the liberal arts and sciences. Now, through the Barney Charter School Initiative, the college is helping found and support classical charter schools of excellence. Through curriculum design and teacher training, the Initiative helps create schools where students can receive a rich education in the liberal arts and sciences and in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.
Grace College
Seven Oaks Classical School is chartered through Grace College by Grace Schools Charter Authority. As a public charter school, Seven Oaks Classical School must maintain a charter that outlines its contractual obligations to a state-approved authorizer.
Image
The image of the oak tree reflects our belief that students need deep roots and a strong inner core if they are to thrive in the face of life’s challenges. The work of education is not instant, but requires constant nourishment over many years. The result, however, is a beautiful and flourishing life.
Name
Seven Oaks Classical School takes its name from the seven liberal arts of learning, which date from antiquity and were codified in the Middle Ages. These included the trivium, or “three ways”—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and the quadrivium, or “four ways”—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The former focus on speech, the latter on numbers. Together, these arts were thought to provide the best possible foundation for all subsequent studies, for participation in the civic life of the community, and for placing students on a path to know and do the true, the beautiful, and the good.
Motto
Our motto is SCIENTIA EST LIBERTAS, “knowledge is liberty.” We believe that a classical education truly is a liberal education: Traditionally, a classical education has been regarded both as the education that is fitting for citizens of a free society, and the education that best fits citizens to be free. We agree. Our rich and varied education in the arts and sciences frees students from the shackles of their own slender experience. In a very real way, their existence is broadened through an encounter with other times, places, practices, and ideas.