Mission Statement
The mission of Our Lady of Champion Academy is to provide Catholic, classical, catechetical, and affordable hybrid schooling to the families of the Diocese of Arlington to aid them in educating their children.
The Story. His Story.
Stories serve as a means through which we understand our own identity and the nature of God. Perhaps God is The Storyteller? Could this be why stories profoundly move us in all our faculties: of heart, mind, & soul? While beauty and music have the power to pierce us deeply in the present moment, stories are what stay with us in all of life’s moments. We understand ourselves and our relationship to others most immediately as belonging to a story.
Stories transmit the ideas and values a people hold most sacred to their identity, and stories are the unifying principles of every culture. A culture’s stories precede and inform its cultural achievements of music, art, and architecture. No Civilization is built without a Story first inspiring its people to build it.
A Catholic, classical education places God's story at the center of its curriculum and teaching. Every compelling narrative, ranging from myths, fables, and fairy tales to poems and the Bible, can be seen as a glimpse of God's narrative. Through these teachings, God communicates part of His Story to us. The heart of Catholic classical education is the story. The St. Patrick Curriculum has been developed to present students the Story God is telling us: the Story of our Salvation.
Educational Philosophy (K-4)
From the Fall of Adam and Eve to the End of Time, God is calling His people back to Himself. He is telling each of us the Eternal Story of His Love: how Our Lord, Jesus Christ, incarnated God and Man, entered Creation in “real time” to redeem and free us from the slavery of sin. In Catholic classical education, the Story of Salvation is the central pillar unifying all aspects of the curriculum.
A classical education is designed, especially in the early years, and particularly through stories, to form the moral imagination, memory, poetic sensibilities, and aesthetic sense. These powers of the soul inform our reason and our will (not the reverse) to recognize and choose the good, true, and beautiful, and to identify and find repellant the bad, the false, and the ugly.
Also, of primary importance in the first years of a classical education is disciplined training in the foundational skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the skills by which the mind processes and comprehends the language of words and numbers.
But the most fundamental formation a child can receive in education, stretching to adulthood, is the rooted understanding that his or her very identity and reason for existing is located in the Person of our Lord, Jesus Christ, Who has called us to follow His will and fulfill our role in His Story.