Valor Education

At Valor, we believe a truly human education addresses our deepest longings—to pursue knowledge, to have meaningful friendships, and to grow in wisdom and virtue. We are a community of friends seeking that which is noble and inviting students into that life. A Valor education is about much more than college and career readiness. It is an invitation to live the fullest life possible, one directed by wisdom, animated by wonder, and anchored in friendship.

Valor’s distinctive K-12 tuition-free classical charter schools offer students a full human education rooted in the classical liberal arts tradition, from the Great Books to fine arts to advanced math and science. Through Socratic teaching and a school culture filled with joy, respect, and deep engagement, our classical schools are forming students in wisdom and virtue so they can become fully alive and truly free.

The Valor Institute is a creative response to the unique challenges of our time: reductive ideologies, mechanized views of the natural world, and communities fractured through impoverished public discourse. At stake is the meaning of human life in community. Responding to these trends that flatten our culture, the Institute seeks to deepen our engagement with reality by cultivating wisdom, gratitude, and friendship.

“The Purpose of elementary and higher education is not to make of the youth a truly wise man, but to equip his mind with an ordered knowledge which will enable him to advance toward wisdom in his manhood.” - Jaques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

At the heart of every person is a desire to know and to be known. At Valor, we believe a truly human education addresses our deepest longings—to live in authentic communities, to have meaningful friendships, and to grow in wisdom and virtue. Our K-12 tuition-free classical charter schools and the Valor Institute have a singular vision: to educate the whole person in authentic communities for a full human life. 

“We may now define in a more precise manner the aim of education. It is to guide man in the evolving dynamism through which he shapes himself as a human person—armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues—while at the same time conveying to him the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which he is involved, and preserving in this way the century-old achievements of generations.” - Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

“Thus what is of most importance in educators themselves is a respect for the soul as well as for the body of the child, the sense of his innermost essence and his internal resources, and a sort of sacred and loving attention to his mysterious identity, which is a hidden thing that no techniques can reach. And what matters most in the educational enterprise is a perpetual appeal to intelligence and free will in the young.” - Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

“From the philosophical point of view alone the main concept to be stressed here is the concept of human personality. Man is a person, who holds himself in hand by his intelligence and his will. He does not merely exist as a physical being. There is in him a richer and nobler existence; he has spiritual super existence through knowledge and love. He is thus, in some a way, a whole, not merely a part; he is a universe unto himself, a microcosm in which the great universe in its entirety can be encompassed through knowledge. And through love he can give himself freely to beings who are to him, as it were, other selves; and for this relationship no equivalent can be found in the physical world.” - Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

"The education of man is a human awakening." - Jacques Maritain

"The education of man is a human awakening." - Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads