Providence Academy is a pre-K through 12 private institution of learning that provides a Classical Education to the Coulee Region. This kind of education divides the student’s career into three distinct stages known as the Trivium.

The Grammar Stage (grades K–5) emphasizes Saxon Math skills, phonics based reading programs, memorization of poetry, and the reading of classic children’s stories. The goal of this stage is to provide a groundwork for what the child should know. The Dialectic Stage (6–8) builds on the previous stage by adding Critical Thinking exercises and formal Logic. The goal of this stage is to teach the student how to think logically and clearly about the things they know. The Rhetoric Stage (9–12) builds on the previous two stages by adding training in writing and speaking. The goal of this stage is to train the student to present what they know and how they know it in a clear and persuasive manner. Incorporated into each of these stages is the study of Greek and Latin from which so much of the English language is derived.

The entire curriculum is taught in light of the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church as this is defined and presented by the Magisterium.  Catholic devotions and liturgy permeate every aspect of the student’s daily schedule. We attend Mass daily. Confessions are heard once a month. We pray the Angelus every day at noon.

Finding a balance between the strict academic performance and appreciation of the other pleasures of life can be difficult.  However, the Classical Curriculum is not designed to just provide students with facts and figures with which to get good grades.  Rather, its goal is to form the whole person, to make the student more human. 

Being human means, among other things, being able to relate to a culture.  Thus, the goal of the Classical Curriculum is to form young souls to be able to appreciate not just the remarkable clarity of Euclid’s propositions, for instance, but also the astounding beauty of a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins.  This education is not meant, either, to take away a child’s wonder for creation itself.  The art of man is often an imitation of what we see in nature, thus a familiarity with the world about them, with nature itself is an important part of forming the entire person.   

The word “culture” comes from the Latin word cultus, which refers to the tilling of the field.  It is a farming word that over time has come to mean many things, including the care of those things most precious to us: our family, our faith, our way of life.  These things require regular care, tilling if you will, and so culture cannot be something we just let other people worry about (the fields will not harvest themselves).  Nor is it something over which we can presume to have complete control (we did not create the field). We must work with what God has given us in order to take special care of what is most precious. We must work to form the whole person in their appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

To do this Providence Academy attempts to form individuals cognizant of their eternal destiny.  With heaven as the ultimate end of all our efforts, the approach to Academics becomes more than mere rote memorization or performance on standardized tests.  We hope to take part in the family’s work of creating moral individuals who seek to serve their neighbors and God.  In this way, the culture can be preserved for our generation and for generations to come.