Academics

Upper School

Seventh through Twelfth Grade

The aim of the Veritas Upper School is to cultivate students who embody the Portrait of the Graduate and who, by loving and pursuing proper things, are prepared to engage the world with humble skillfulness and confident care. Veritas believes that the best way to cultivate these qualities in our students is through the Liberal Arts, the path of learning long trodden by Christians for centuries.

The following distinctives characterize Upper School learning:

List of 6 items.

  • The Humane Letters

    Courses in Humane Letters (Humanities) invite students into the Great Conversation about ideas with which people in all places and times wrestle. Of particular focus at Veritas is how Christian thinkers have engaged those ideas. Without shying away from philosophies that do not align with biblical thought, teachers lead students through literature and art that reflect the big questions of humankind while fostering habits of bringing every thought captive for Christ.  
  • Verbal Arts (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric)

    Students continue their work in the Trivium—the verbal arts—through reading increasingly complex texts (Grammar) in all disciplines and in designated Logic and Rhetoric courses. Wielding true words with skill and eloquence is the goal of the work in the verbal arts. 

    The senior year culminates in a thesis project, drawing together in practice all that students have learned about constructing a thoughtful and persuasive argument on a significant topic.
  • Mathematics & Science

    Mathematics and Science classes awaken wonder and impart skills to see and study the orderly world of creation as beautiful evidence of God’s design, not divorcing scientific knowledge from its place in a unified cosmos. Students are encouraged to see the subjects of their studies as an integrated whole before they analytically dissect them into parts.
  • Biblical Studies

    Complementing historical and literary studies, the Bible curriculum addresses principles of interpretation, surveys biblical doctrine, and consistently challenges students to apply what they have learned. 
  • Latin

    Latin classes instruct students through active and communicative methods that aim at making students intuitive readers of Latin texts. Latin courses culminate in reading and discussing selections from a broad range of Latin literature, such as Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Vergil’s Aeneid, the Vulgate, and works by Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas, and Petrarch.  
  • Senior Thesis & Oration Project

    The senior year culminates in a thesis project, drawing together in practice all that students have learned about constructing a thoughtful and persuasive argument on a significant topic. In their 12th grade Rhetoric course, students spend time reading, researching, writing, discussing, re-writing, and presenting deliberative arguments. The first result is a well-researched, academically written and formatted thesis, which must be defended in front of a panel of faculty members. Students also deliver a speech, using an outline, that is fitting to the prioritization of live, spoken speech in the Rhetorical tradition, requiring students to demonstrate skill in the means of persuasion.

Head of Upper School

Ms. Robyn Burlew

Humane Letters Reading List

The reading list also includes additional poetry, essays, and excerpts

The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
Antigone, Sophocles
The Histories, Herodotus
The Republic, Plato
The Aeneid, Virgil
Roman Lives, Plutarch
The City of God, Augustine 
The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius 
Rule of St. Benedict, Benedict of Nursia
The Life of St. Benedict, Pope Gregory the Great
Beowulf 
The Song of Roland 
The Divine Comedy,
Dante
The Institutes of the Christian Religion,
John Calvin 
Julius Caesar
 and Hamlet, William Shakespeare 
Paradise Lost, John Milton 
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe 
The Social Contract, Jean Jacques Rousseau 
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick
, Herman Melville 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Lewis Stevenson 
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 
St. Francis of Assisi, G. K. Chesterton 
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck 
The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis 
The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis

Cry, The Beloved Country, Alan Paton 
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Typical Sequence of Study (Grades 7 - 12)