St Ann's School

Saint Ann’s School is not unusual in wanting to prepare children creatively and efficiently in the academic disciplines and the arts, and surely not unique in wanting students who demonstrate amply the necessary aptitude and motivation. What is out of the ordinary, we think, is our habit of giving students freedom to achieve, to value learning more than propriety, to trust the unadorned pleasures of learning, unassisted by point scores, prizes, rankings, and punishments. At Saint Ann’s it is hard to distinguish curriculum from community. A curriculum is traditionally thought of as a sequence of concepts and details, assumed to be related to each other, and thought to be learnable in a given period. For us, however, the curriculum is pervasive: a vehicle for learning skills as well as facts; the medium of our friendship with children; a source of humor and poetry; a focus for activities across the disciplines and for formalisms from art to algebra. It is also a way for our students to reach us. As we share enthusiasm, it becomes our common ground, the center around which a group can be built, in the classroom and beyond it.