St. John Bosco Schools

The Lower School
The top priorities in the elementary education of children are the proper development of their core sensory and intellectual faculties of fine and gross motor skills, imagination, and memory.  Equally as important is fostering of a “learning atmosphere such that the child is“emotionally engaged and motivated in learning, to exercise intellect, imagination and memory in an emotionally satisfying way.”   Lastly, the student must possess and grow the moral virtues which enable receptivity to learning and taking direction by right reason (normally exercised by the teacher).

Thus the lower school curriculum is structured so as to accomplish four primary objectives by teaching proper habits:

1. Helping students develop a healthy emotional connection with the classroom experience (wonder);

2. Helping students develop their sense faculties to appropriately engage the physical world (motor skills);

3. Helping students develop precision in their imaginative faculties so as to appropriately represent reality (healthy imaginations).

4. Providing students with the learning tools they need to further engage reality (e.g., listening and speaking, reading, writing, measuring, etc.).

The Middle School
The middle school experience utilizes the student’s natural capacity for “wonder” to engage the faculties developed throughout the Lower School experience and further develop the moral and intellectual faculties that enable proper judgment and reason. Here again, such development primarily takes the form of an intellectually elevating conversation between the teacher, the students and the texts themselves.  Through such conversation, the student is challenged to reason properly (i.e., support conclusions with evidence) and learn to make right-ordered judgments (i.e., identify distinctions between real things).

Proficiency in reading is emphasized in all of our courses, as it is essential to all other studies.