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No, this is not an attempt to approximate a beauty pageant question. No, this is not an attempt to carve for a new school, a new niche. No, this is not an attempt to exalt a new school's 'newness'. This is a rhetorical question that attempts to approximate meaning to a new school's 'gradual becoming'.
What is the essence of a Berean education? It must have already reached your auditory canals that the curriculum we are using at Berea is the first of its kind in the country, if not in the continent. This is also what you perhaps have heard of as the Transformative Curriculum. It is a composite curriculum that combines the best of the arts and the sciences. It is a veritable amalgamation of the curricula of both the PSHS and PHSA. You can think of it as a not-so-cold fusion of Bronx High and Juilliard (naks!)... But the curriculum is not the be-all and end-all of a Berean education. In fact, the curriculum is not, per se, the essence of a Berean education.
What is then the essence of a Berean education? With a powerful curriculum at the backdrop of a Berean education, the only other aspect of significance left in the identification of a Berean education's essence is the potent force that must come from the educative interaction between the faculty and the student body. When finally we are able to find a solid platform on which to anchor both pillars in the Berean education, then eventually we are able to definitively identify meaning in what we decide to do and hope to achieve.
The essence of a Berean education comes from every Berean's ability to transform the world he or she lives in - into a kind of world that can be shared by people regardless of societal impositions bordering on the ideal and the ideological. (Believe it or not.) This is the same ability that is tempered by the strictures of the different disciplines of the mind. Or perhaps not, for it could be more. This is the same ability that is shaped by the thoughtful forcings of both the love for beauty and the passion for reason. Or perhaps not, for it could be more. This is the same ability that smoothly translates into a kind of goodness that is widely perceived as being reasonably good indeed. Or perhaps not, for it could be more.
The essence of a Berean education lies in every Berean's ability to use a holistic approach in addressing the world's ills... or, in solving a Math homework. It lies in every Berean's ability to translate this 'unique ability' into a kind of goodness that is replete with hope. It lies in every Berean's ability to realize that his or her education is the same education that any learner of life gets to achieve whether he or she is in Berea or elsewhere. It lies in every Berean's ability to actualize the fact that he or she shares more commonalities with other learners elsewhere than differences. It is the essence of being able to weave a different thread of conviction into the one common fabric of humanistic learning.
