Trinity School at Meadow View

Our campus in Falls Church, Virginia, is the third in the nationally acclaimed Trinity Schools program. For more than three decades, Trinity Schools have provided a unique culture where young men and women develop the intellectual habits they need for a lifetime of discovering truth, practicing goodness and creating beauty. In our core curriculum, we give all of our students signature learning experiences: Socratic seminars on the best of Western literature, the application of the MATLAB computing language to advanced math and science problems, intensive training in writing, with special focus on the analytic essay, and a wide range of performance opportunities, where all our students compose, sing, paint and act.

Our community of learners is coed, but our classes are single sex, with no more than 20 students per classroom. This maximizes the ability of the individual student to learn well and to develop good friendships. Ours is also an ecumenical Christian culture marked by daily prayer and a moral order deeply rooted in Scripture and Christian tradition. Our ecumenism is a sign of Christian unity and one vital source of our common mission to serve God and our neighbors.

The mission of Trinity Schools is to impart basic ordered knowledge about the world and to train students in basic intellectual skills and qualities of mind so that they might be of use to God in the wise care and governance of his creation and in the building of his kingdom. We accomplish this by establishing a culture marked by the discovery of truth, the practice of goodness, the creation of beauty, and the development of intellectual and aesthetic habits of mind. Trinity School is a community of learners characterized by the rigorous exploration of reality, the free and disciplined exchange of ideas, and active participation in the fine arts.

The educational objectives of Trinity School can effectively be arranged under the categories of the true, the good and the beautiful. With regard to truth, our goals include that our students develop the ability to discover and understand it wherever it is found. Further, we want our students to possess an ever- increasing knowledge and understanding of reality: how things actually stand in all spheres of inquiry. Additionally, we expect to see and aid in the development of a sense of wonder within our students: wonder about reality and a desire to learn more. We want to inculcate within them a love for the truth.

With regard to goodness, our goals include that our students desire the good in their own lives and in the world. We want them to become morally and spiritually serious persons. Further we want our students to develop the ability to recognize the good. Finally, we desire that the students appropriate the practices that will produce good in their own lives and in the lives of those around them.

With regard to beauty, our goals include that the students not only develop the ability to recognize and love beauty, but that they also attain proficiency in the skills requisite to producing beautiful things in art, music and drama. We intend for our students thereby to develop a love of beauty in its various expressions. In addition to these overarching goals, we also intend that every student develop particular skills and qualities. These include the following:

• Linguistic literacy: That our students know how language works and are able to employ it with accuracy and effectiveness. This includes the knowledge of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and other rules of language; the ability to formulate a thesis and defend it.
• Mathematical literacy: That our students know how mathematics works and are proficient in its use; that they can apply it in scientific settings. This includes the ability to use symbolic manipulation, representation, and abstraction; the development of proofs and understanding of formal systems.
• Scientific literacy: That our students know the basic facts, principles, and concepts of geology, biology, chemistry, and physics; that they are equipped to learn more in each of these areas.
• Aesthetic literacy: That our students develop an awareness of and appreciation for narrative structure, metaphor, order, proportion, line, color, rhythm, melody, harmony, etc.
• Fundamental literacy: That our students are able to gather information from observation, from experience and from reflection; that they are able to abstract, analyze, synthesize, apply, and evaluate knowledge.
• Qualities of thought: That our students exhibit a sense of wonder, strong imagination, clarity, precision, consistency, relevance, depth of inquiry, intellectual honesty, and intellectual humility.
• Personal qualities: That our students possess the habitual vision of greatness, moral and spiritual seriousness, endurance, regard for others, humility, honesty, and moral imagination.
• Social virtues: That our students show respect for others and their views; that they recognize the dignity of all humans, and are able to converse and dialogue intelligently; that they possess an ecumenical spirit in all matters of Christianity.