Seattle Classical Co-op is a group of classically minded homeschooling families. Through sequential, book-based, multi-sensory learning, we encourage and equip one another to raise our children to follow Christ, to love knowledge, and to act on what they know.
First and foremost, we are a community of prayer. When we gather on Fridays, our first action of the day is to share the blessings and burdens of the week and to pray together—for one another, for our children, for the day ahead. Only after we have prayed do we move into the rest of the day and our corporate studies.
We study the Bible first, before our other subjects, because as Charlotte Mason says, “The knowledge of God ranks first in importance, is indispensable, and most happy-making,” and that knowledge has its source in the Old and New Testaments. We seek to ground our children in the panorama of Hebrew history from Abraham to Malachi that they may perceive that Israel’s story is our personal story writ large and the story of humankind writ small. We seek to introduce them to the Person of Our Lord, through His actions and His words, that they might know and love the Savior of the world.
We study history because it is the stage on which people have been acting since the beginning of time. To know history is to know humanity. “There is nothing new under the sun,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and those who study history know this to be true. A capacious understanding of the rise and fall of empires, of the role great men and women play at turning points in time, of the merits and mistakes of the past enables a person to avoid the fate that Santayana predicted: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We seek to learn of the past in part so that we may learn from the past.
We study science because the universe is God’s handiwork, and we honor Him by attending to, pondering, and wondering over all that He has created. The natural world is immense and beautiful and orderly. We seek to introduce children to some of its immensity, beauty, and order that they may be inspired to care for creation and adore its Creator.
We believe that knowledge is an end in itself, not the means to a good job or a college scholarship (though these may be by-products of knowledge) and that the true mark of an educated person is not how much they know but how much they care about what they know. This is why we exist: to encourage and equip one another to raise our children to know Christ, to love knowledge, and to care enough to act on what they know.