Our Learning Culture

At Whitefish Christian Academy students cultivate a life-long love for learning. That comes as a result of a school-wide culture built on these foundational principles:

  • Truth is Discoverable: Our learning environment encourages hard questions and meaningful answers; it gives students the freedom to explore.

  • Beauty for Beauty’s Sake: We believe good education starts and ends in awe and wonder.

  • Goodness As a Goal: What we know is important, yet who we become is most important.

Freedom to Explore

Study at the Academy begins with the belief that, because God has created the world, there is order and meaning in all that we study.

As a result, students are free to get at the heart of things, to reach for satisfying answers, and to weigh complex arguments wisely, with patience and humility.

Whether in mathematics, the humanities or in science, the Academy student asks challenging questions, and seeks always to find thorough, meaningful answers.

Awe & Wonder

It is a widespread modern problem that we are no longer enchanted by the Meadowlark’s song in spring or the harmony of mathematical patterns found on the aspen’s quaking leaf. God’s created world is beautiful, and it’s to be seen and experienced that way.

So while study at the Academy aims for truth, it likewise aims for beauty. To see and experience beauty are essential to full, well-ordered lives. When we experience the beautiful, we’re lifted up - we yearn to reflect that beauty in the way we live and in the things we make.

In one of his classic novels Fyodor Dostoevsky, an author we study, once said, “Beauty will save the world.” We believe him to be true. Therefore Academy students not only learn a thing to know it, but to behold and be shaped by the beauty of it. The result is a learning culture that is alive to wonder in all that we study.

When Good is Great

Excellence in what we do is important, but goodness is paramount. What good is an education if it doesn’t make us good ourselves?

In pursuing the true and loving the beautiful, Academy students are likewise called to be good. Our course of study supports this goal: In reading great works like The Wind in The Willows or Idylls of the King, students are pointed to the examples of Christ-like characters who embody what it means to live the good life toward God and man.

This is the most salient part of our school’s culture: Students enjoy and serve one another. To be good is to be great at WCA.