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A Rich Curriculum Trinity’s emphasis on a rich curriculum derives from the notion that children are created in the image of God. As such, they have the capacity to experience and reflect on God’s world, and the capacity to know truth, do good, and appreciate beauty. Charlotte Mason, an English educator in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, observed that all children are born eager to learn, with wide intellectual interests. Even the youngest children are curious about their world. They are inquisitive and absorb information easily, and they interact with that information, with the “living ideas” that nourish their active brains. Children’s minds are not empty vessels needing to be filled full of facts and information. Rather, children are active learners with an appetite for learning. They are living persons that thrive on age-appropriate ideas from all of life. The role of the teacher is to ignite the fire of knowledge by leading the students through a rich curriculum of books and things. Mason believed that children can tell good materials from poor ones, and accordingly, she advocated a curriculum that allows children to interact with the best materials available and ones suited to their developmental stage. This includes “living books” (well-written, worthwhile books, the classics of all eras), classics of art and music, and ample first-hand interaction with the actual materials of nature and science. Mason also taught that the most meaningful education occurs when a person forms relationships with an idea, a story, a painting, a piece of music, or an object of nature. These relationships may be cognitive or aesthetic, intellectual or emotional, but they involve more than the mere memorization of facts. Rather, students become familiar with their object of study, identifying its interesting details, connecting it to its time in history, relating it to other works. In their study of it, the students make it their own, and like people we have come to know, it is not easily forgotten. At Trinity we seek to enable and foster this kind of learning. Trinity School aims to offer a rich curriculum for all students. Our focus is on living ideas: ideas that stimulate thought, inquiry, and inference, and lead students to acquire not merely information but knowledge. This focus is sometimes realized in a broad curriculum, sometimes in a deep one. By active engagement with living ideas, captured in the great conversations and traditions of Western and non-Western cultures, our students gain knowledge about the past and learn to relate to the world around them. Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill |
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