January 2025
Dear Friend of Golden View Classical Academy,
In early January, we had the pleasure of hosting several alumni for a question and answer session with current sophomores and juniors. Students have thousands of questions about what life is like after high school, and who better than GVCA grads to answer them?
It was a great event, but one answer to one question in particular really helped me see something that I didn’t see before. So, to back up a bit, we get the question all of the time about how GVCA prepares students for college or life after high school. Here is my stock answer: most schools think about this in terms of academic skills, AP classes, or SAT scores. In fact, there is a threshold in the math and English sections of the SAT that, if you don’t meet, you are said not to be “college ready” in the state of Colorado. But we think about it more comprehensively. Imagine you’re going to CU Boulder (best school ever), and a new friend tells you that there’s a party on the Hill that weekend. Now I’m not going to tell you you shouldn’t go, but I am going to ask you…are you sure you want to go? Will it be good for you?
Golden View prepares students, specifically through their thesis and generally in their course of study, to think long and hard about moral questions. They have to write about and defend their understanding of the good life. That means that when they go to college and are confronted with a moral choice like “what to do on Thursday night,” they will have some resources, maybe even some really developed resources, to help them navigate that successfully. I think every parent truly knows this, that serious moral thinking is better preparation for life than academic scores.
I share all this because there was an alumna who offered an even better answer. She said that she was on a mission trip, really a series of them across the world, and completing an online business degree. Not a bad way to spend a year. Anyway, a student asked her a question about how the thesis changed her, and she lit up. She said that there were so many things she saw on her trip that she thought “oh man, I should have put that in my thesis.”
Let’s look closely at that. I take her to mean that the thesis gave her the conceptual framework to think through a range of moral questions, such that certain experiences that otherwise would have been run-of-the-mill or not even noticed were arranged and nicely slotted into her way of perceiving the world. That means that the thesis, more than just preparing her to think about morality, actually revealed the moral dimension of her experiences and perceptions in a way that enriched her life.
That was an incredible answer, and is my answer going forward, about how Golden View prepares students to live a good life.
Sincerely,
Dr. Garrow
Principal, Golden View Classical Academy
