The Vision

From the Headmaster

The new school year is fast approaching. We welcome new students, families, volunteers and supporters.

The administration has been working hard this summer to strengthen our school and fine tune our goals and plans. We are dedicated to providing our families with excellent quality in education and administration.

Many private schools today offer an easy approach to learning with tolerant character training. At Richmond Academy, we are dedicated to challenging the student to grow far beyond what they think or imagine. Our students grow to be young men and women with intellect for success and with disciplined hearts after God.

We are thankful for the ability, the integrity, and the character that Richmond Academy has through its families, faculty and staff.

-Dr. S. Chad Ross

Ten Ways You Can Help

1. Pray for us.

2. Give a memorial or honorarium gift to the Triune Fund

3. Remember Richmond Academy in your will

4. Purchase clothing and decals at our Spirit Shop

5. Schedule us to visit your church or ask your pastor to speak at our chapel

6. Sign up for “.org News” www.richmondacademy.org

7. Turn in Labels:
Box Tops for Education ($.10/label)

8. Link Richmond Academy to your website or advertise on ours

9. Volunteer your time

10. Turn in empty ink and toner cartridges ($3/cartridge)

Testimonials

This is our second year. Our children have been loved and cared for by Mrs. Wicker and Ms. Marcum. It is very comforting to know my children are not going through the things I’ve heard from public school. There will never be a teaching that will cause confusion or doubt of God: Who He is or what He can do. I praise God that when we needed prayer you were there and when we needed help you were there.

- Janet C.

Enrollment News

Richmond Academy is receiving enrollment of new students for the 2007-08 school year. Call or email the office to receive an application packet for your child.

At this time, we offer multi-student discounts for all families. We can also offer a small scholarship based on financial need. Beyond this, most churches understand the importance of their children getting a private Christian education and will help. Families interested in Richmond Academy with a financial need should speak to their church's board members and ask for help.

If you are interested in sending your student to Richmond Academy, it is important to apply now. First tuition payment is due June 28 and we want to ensure that your child will have books for the first day of school.

Goods and Services

We are in need of the following goods:

· 1 LCD projector

· Sports Equipment

· Score table with possession arrows

· Scoreboard

· Wall pads

· Competition volleyball equipment

· Classroom furniture

We are in need of the following services:

· Grant Writer

· Math Teacher

· Chapel Speaker

· Volunteers

· Substitute Teachers

If you can help in any way, please contact the main office.

Do you have a gift or talent that you would like to share with the children? Please contact us about that as well. We are always looking for volunteers to enhance our academic programs.

Who Killed Excellence?

Editor’s Preview: There has been much talk of a crisis in education and much speculation as to what or who is to blame for the mediocrity in our schools. Professor Samuel Blumenfeld offers a clear and convincing explanation of how the goals of the professional educator have changed and have thus adversely affected the quality and content of education.

Blumenfeld states that James Cattell, John Dewey, and Edward Thorndike virtually rebuilt education on a foundation of science, evolution, humanism and behaviorism. Their work remains virtually uncontested in many universities today. New theories of learning were developed to accommodate their vision.

In Dewey’s words, “learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attached to literature seems to me a great perversion.” He argued that a high literacy rate bred a “destructive” individualism.

Who killed excellence in education? Professor Blumenfeld indicts the behaviorists, and he remarks that the future of American education still rests upon resolving the profoundly philosophical question: What are the proper aims of education?

The history of American education can be roughly divided into three distinct periods, each representing a particular and powerful world view. The first period—from colonial times to the 1840s—saw the dominance of the Calvinist ethic: God’s omnipotent sovereignty was the central reality of man’s existence. The second period, lasting from the 1840s until about World War I, reflects the Hegelian mindset. The third period, from World War I to the present, I call “Progressive.” It came into being mainly as a result of the new behavioral psychology developed in the experimental laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In this scheme, the purpose of man’s life was to deny and reject the supernatural and to sacrifice oneself to the collective, often referred to as “humanity.” Science and evolution replaced religion as the focus of faith, and dialectical materialism superseded Hegel’s dialectical idealism as the process by which man’s moral progress was made. The word “progressive,” in fact, comes from this dialectical concept of progress.

G. Stanley Hall beat the first path to Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig. Hall returned from his Wundtian experience in 1878 and in 1882 created America’s first psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Two of Hall’s students were James Cattell and John Dewey. Cattell’s most celebrated pupil was Edward L. Thorndike, who had gotten his master’s degree under William James at Harvard, where he had also conducted experiments in animal learning. Under Cattell, Thorndike continued his experiments which were to have a devastating impact on American education. Thorndike reduced psychology to the study of observable, measurable human behavior— with the complexity and mystery of mind and soul left out. In summing up his theory of learning, Thorndike wrote:

“The best way with children may often be, in the pompous words of an animal trainer, ‘to arrange everything in connection with the trick so that the animal will be compelled by the laws of its own nature to perform it.’”

In 1904, Cattell invited his old friend John Dewey to join the faculty at Columbia. From Johns Hopkins, Dewey had not gone to Leipzig like Cattell and others. Instead he taught philosophy at the University of Michigan for about nine years. In 1894 he became professor of philosophy and education at the University of Chicago where he created his famous Laboratory School.

The purpose of the school was to see what kind of curriculum was needed to produce socialists instead of capitalists, collectivists instead of individualists. Dewey, along with the other adherents of the new psychology, was convinced that socialism was the wave of the future and that individualism was passé. But the individualist system would not fade away on its own as long as it was sustained by the education American children were getting in their schools. According to Dewey, “. . . education is growth under favorable conditions; the school is the place where those conditions should be regulated scientifically.” In other words, if we apply psychology to education, which we have done now for over fifty years, then the ideal classroom is a psych lab and the pupils within it are laboratory animals.

Dewey provided the social philosophy of the movement, Thorndike the teaching theories and techniques, and Cattell the organizing energy. There was among all of them, disciples and colleagues, a missionary zeal to rebuild American education on a foundation of science, evolution, humanism, and behaviorism...