The John and Abigail Adams Family Academy is a distance learning, live-online Jr. High dedicated to
Building the foundations of the family, educating youth and parents in the arts of liberty and life.
We offer a liberal arts program for students ages 11-14 located anywhere in the world. We honor parent stewardship and tailor student instruction with small classes. Mentoring is a time to start a dialogue regarding life, the past, current goings on and the future.
Students engage in the standard Liberal Arts Private School methods using the Oxford, Great Books and Leadership models as core contributing models.
To download click here: JAAA Student-parent Handbook
Academic Program
John & Abigail 5 Methods that make it all happen ……..1-3
– Simulations………………………………………………………….1
– Student projects (P.L.A.N book and portfolio)…………1
– Writing workshop…………………………………………………2
– Student-to-student learning…………………………………..2
– Mentors ………………………………………………………………3
How Learning best occurs…………………………………………3
Role of Parents ……………………………………………………….4
Role of JAAA Mentor……………………………………………….4
3-5 student groups……………………………………………………5
Correspondence Virtual…………………………………………….5
Student-led Learning ……………………………………………….5
Students are Listeners First……………………………………….5
Elective Classes ……………………………………………………….5
Accountability, Assessment and Accreditation
Natural Accountability………………………………………………6
Student Assessment …………………………………………………6
Grading …………………………………………………………………..6
General Information
Behavior…………………………………………………………………..6
Religion …………………………………………………………………..7
Student Supply List …………………………………………………..7
Tuition and funding
Tuition …………………………………………………………………….7
15-day Satisfaction Guarantee…………………………………….8
Self-Funding with Education 360º Level 3 ………………….8
JAAA Financial Aid …………………………………………………..8
Enrollment Procedure ……………………………………………….8
360º Mentoring Program
Basic overview and link ……………………………………………..8
Conclusion
Thank you…………………………………………………………………8
To download click here: JAAA Student-parent Handbook
1. Classics
Classics are modern and historical works, which capture inspiration in a lasting way for the benefit of humanity. The test of a classic: As a person returns to it, he or she becomes a new and better person each time. Classics are often books, music, people, art, media, nature, etc. Students are inspired by the greatest thinkers of all time. Classics establish the foundation of each subject taught.
2. Personal and public relations (PR-Learning)
Personal-relations supply the backbone of education. Choices and habits regarding personal-relations constitute our happiness. Our emphasis on PR provides the very foundation for our assessment and educational philosophy. We empower students by encouraging relations both local and expert to become involved in the student’s development. We also focus on providing the habits and skills which foster great relationships.
As students feel more confident with their own contributions, we include key people that will inspire them as they pursue life-long expertise in different fields and special interests.
PR-Learning Course
The purpose of the PR-Learning Course is to assist students in building initiative and provide the tools they need to be successful in today’s changing environment.
The PR-Learning Course is a 24-step course that parallels the student’s learning experience. It introduces the correct use of relationships into their learning.
Through PR-Learning students learn to interact with their local community members — businesses, traditional school organizations and civic leaders. This program fuels the student’s experiments, funding and impact. To learn more visit www.EducationalAscent.com
3. Three Mentors
Life Mentor:
The Life Mentor helps the student plan and prepare for life. This mentor works with the student to build leadership character and can also be accessed as the student explores the purpose of life, direction and meaning.
Academic Mentor:
An Academic Mentor is what we traditionally referred to as a ‘teacher’ or even ‘professor’. This mentor helps the student regarding what, when and how a student thinks, as well as skill development and training.
Relations Mentor:
The Relations Mentor helps the students identify the different types of personal and public relations and to coach them, as they understand their roles better and help them optimize relations as students learn about their ability to contribute to the world.
Mentors are working within the leadership education model; each academic mentor meets at least monthly with students for personal coaching and accountability. Personal mentoring allows us to tailor a program to fit each student’s needs, no matter their academic level. A great mentor is one who delivers his personal energy and character to the student in a pure and distinct way.
4. Gifts and Roles
A student’s education begins with the student. The student’s parents and mentor must be aware of where the student is coming from. One of the surest ways to align education with the student is to build upon his or her unique gifts, which become evident as the student contributes and serves.
We recognize that young men and young women are not the same. We encourage and help students tailor their education to fulfill their God-given roles.
5. Interdisciplinary Learning
Interdisciplinary learning happens when a student or mentor chooses to find the parallel attributes of sometimes very diverse disciplines, e.g. math and the cycles of history, or business systems and plant science. Our natural learning processes require connections and relations. The challenging environment of today provides unique opportunities to students who become proficient in interdisciplinary learning. Students may learn ten-fold what past generations did, and apply it all in productive ways.
Our world is becoming more and more specialized. As this trend continues, the danger that people will understand each other less and less increases. Interdisciplinary learning achieves three objectives: 1) it increases a student’s ‘epiphany rate’, 2) it consolidates or simplifies mass data into learnable formats, and 3) it helps students connect to divergent ideas and even people.
Similar innovative learning models are now implemented through ‘cross curricular’ and ‘collateral learning’ programs. Both will surely become more popular and are manifestations of their growing necessity in education.
6. Core Books
Core books are often associated with the student’s natural cultural background. The core book provides a standard for the student as he or she develops depth of character. It becomes a standard for discovering principles of right and wrong. Because the academy uses a liberal arts model, students will engage with the greatest thinkers of all time and have discussions about the very foundations of cultures and society. Without a core book a student is often tossed here and there as if by the waves of an unseen ocean. Students with a core book have been proven to learn more quickly and with greater depth.
7. Common Place Books
The Common Place Book provides a place to pen fertile thoughts that will grow and shape the student’s future. Students use the Common Place Book to record inspirational moments (epiphanies).
The ancient art of record-keeping benefits a student personally, and society generally. Record keeping helps students to be aware of where they are and where they have been. Portfolios will be the place where publishable works are collected and showcased. Ideas originate and are cultivated in the Common Place Book. Several journals also play key roles in the learning process.
8. Liberal Arts
The liberal arts are those arts which provide for and secure personal and public liberty. These arts are primarily reading, writing, speaking and calculating. The education that best promotes the development of these arts is one of student choice or self-education. A liberal arts program teaches a student how to think. It is this that marks the difference between the liberal arts program and technical or professional training. Learning to work with legal, natural and self-imposed boundaries liberates a student who is taught in the liberal arts. He or she is then prepared to make a great contribution to the world.
9. Projection
Projecting is the art of communicating relevant information to a small but growing group of people (a form of self-publishing). As students learn to project more efficiently, their communication with the world will become more focused and effective. Our first goal will be to turn the light of learning on.
Students must begin to see their academic work as an extension of themselves. Assignments and goals excite students as they see the affect of their efforts on others and value the continued mastery through repetition. A good student continues to improve himself so that he or she can better serve those around him.
10. God
We recognize God as the first and highest educational source.
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Can our school or group use JAAA methods?
Yes, absolutely. Through Community Outreach we help communities and schools learn and use John and Abigail methods.
What is being offered through community outreach:
- Permission to use and customize JAAA model and materials
- A “community outreach handbook” with our thoughts and experience designed to help you customize the JAAA program with periodic email dialogue.
- Video introductions and materials regarding different methods and operations including:
- – - Administrative materials and resources
- – - JAAA simulations
- – - Writing workshops
- – - Student/parent handbook
- – - C3 student-to-student conference calls
- – - P.L.A.N. Books
- – - Curriculum track sheets
- – - Other materials
- FAQ conference calls 2 per semester
- Community-to-community network, profiles and forum
- Periodic video updates of how things are going at the home-academy
- Discounts on elective programs
Cost: $300 per semester
Apply now: http://johnandabigail.com/dl/JAAA_Outreach_App_Form.pdf
Benefits for full-time students:
- 5 Students per class
- 2 Mentor meetings each month
- 7 Mentored simulations per semester
- 16 Writing workshops
- 23 Personal project days
- Live-online virtual-learning classroom
- Electives: “Elocution 360°” and “PR-Learning” included at no additional cost and coming soon
PR-Learning is a tool that helps broad change in education . Each person has their own unique perspective and role in education whether a student, teacher, parent, administrator or outside contributor. Each person involved in PR-Learning receives their own video-based step-by-step course of instruction. By using this approach the desired personal and social change is more likely to occur.
“PR-Learning” sometimes referred to as student and family CRM (customer relationship management) introduces a new way students can manage their personal and public relations. This makes education more meaningful by “optimizing relationships” and developing multiple expanding “writing platforms” or rather support networks of people interested in what the student is doing.
Results of PR-Learning include:
– Classroom effectiveness and better academic performance
– New meaning for students as performance is communicated
– Student-to-student life-long relationships: success of alumni enhanced
– Networking (jobs, college entrance, etc.)
– Innovation (w/specialists, publishing)
– Parent-to-school relations improve
– Family awareness and cohesion (parents, grandparents, distant interaction)
– Funding for the school and for the student (tuition, projects, etc.)
– Better public relations and recruiting as success stories become widespread
– Achievement of school’s end purpose
The relations mentor is one of the 3 suggested mentors in the JAAA Student Parent Handbook: Life, Relations and Academic. Through PR-Learning students learn to engage with the different types of mentors as well as specialists, family, media, friends and benefactors. Each mentor and student can be coached from a distance as they become better at their respective roles.
As teacher, parent, student or administrator we invite you to integrate the methods of PR-Learning into your learning and teaching. If you are an administrator or teacher please visit www.EducationalAscent.com to learn how PR-Learning can be applied in your classroom(s) and improve school PR.
Call us: 435 865 7540
Is education in need of reform? You bet. Almost every good writer today proclaims that education can use some help. Education needs to better connect students with the worlds speed and complexity. It needs to confidently harness and even anticipate dynamic change. Bill Gates assessed our educational situation this way:
“America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they’re broken,
flawed or underfunded. . . . By obsolete, I mean our high schools — even when
they’re working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to know
today. . . . This isn’t an accident or flaw in the system: it is the system
Bill Gates goes on to suggest adding 3 new R’s to education; Rigor, Relevance and Relationships. Students are preparing for the same world in private, public or home education. Though each model implements change differently, the shift will likely be the same. 6 key tools facilitating this fundamental shift are:
Writing Platform
A writing platform in the publishing world refers to the people who are likely to buy your book—in education, its people who have an interest in a student’s development.
Networking Skills
Beyond the basic benefit recognized in the business world, the skill of networking when applied to education can ignite personal-transformation.
3 Types of Mentors
Each student should be encouraged and assisted in finding and utilizing 3 mentors; in life, relations and content (books and studies).
Genius Awareness
World contribution will be magnified exponentially if students enjoy what they do. Genius is inherent in every student. If genius is at the core of education, lifelong education will go on indefinitely.
Portfolio
Portfolios are key to success in the coming age. They tie everything together for the student and the world.
Grounded Outlook
Understanding historical momentum, our current situation and where we are headed prepares students for life & contribution.
The 6 Key Tools bridge the gap between leadership and traditional education. The shifting terrain of tomorrow’s economy, social structure, politics and culture demand a new kind of education—a flexible, natural, lively, robust, integral, optimized, steady, catalytic, grounded education. For those wanting to make these 6 tools an integral part of their education read through the JAAA Student Parent Handbook and register for the coming school year or email: d [dot] AllenLevie [at] gmail [dot] com (no spaces).
Distance learning unlocks solutions to today’s educational problems
“Bill Gates finally laid it on the line: ‘America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and underfunded. . . . By obsolete, I mean that our high schools–even when they’re working exactly as designed–cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. . . . This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.’ ”1 The John and Abigail Adams Mentoring suggests that distance learning can provide a critical answer to replacing antiquated assembly-line education.
The Information Age
The information age has not just opened the flood gates of information but has also released a host of tools empowering students to systematically share themselves with the world. This change increases the educational load for both educators and students. Though this can seem daunting, people have a responsibility to use the age of information wisely. So what does all of this mean? Understanding education in the Information Age can be simple and exciting; each student gets to be (become) more than any previous people in history have been. Let’s step back a little and look at the industrial age.
The Industrial Age
In nearly 200 years the industrial age has produced more life improvements than the previous 6000 years of history. The industrial business machine requires less man power with greater output. Industrial production requires the standardization of parts for both machines and labor. This standardizing or labor has produced standardized and compartmentalized education.
Standardization is making everything doable even “For Dummies”. This is the promise of our new day launched by the industrial revolution–anyone can be educated and anyone can have a high standard of living and be liberated.
Calculation, processing of information and production required by industry are today performed more and more often by computers and robots. Now a growing number of the populace needs a new kind of education, the kind of education that computers and robots cannot replace. It is the education which empowers a person with qualities of liberty, of full agreement, of inspiration, of listening and of understanding ––a Liberal Arts Education.
Liberal Arts
The term “liberal arts” has come to mean studies that are intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills, rather than more specialized occupational or professional skills.
The scope of the liberal arts has often emphasized the education of elites in the classics; but, with the rise of science and humanities during the Age of Enlightenment, the scope and meaning of “liberal arts” expanded to include them. Still excluded from the liberal arts are topics that are specific to particular occupations, such as agriculture, business, dentistry, engineering, medicine, pedagogy (school-teaching), and pharmacy.
Historically the seven liberal arts comprised two groups of studies: the trivium and the quadrivium. Studies in the trivium involved grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and studies in the quadrivium involved arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. These liberal arts made up the core curriculum of the medieval universities. The term liberal in liberal arts is from the Latin word ‘liberalis’, meaning “appropriate for free men” (social or political elites), and they were contrasted with the servile arts. The liberal arts thus initially represented the kinds of skills and general knowledge needed by the elite echelon of society, whereas the servile arts represented specialized tradesman skills and knowledge needed by persons who were employed by the elite.
Liberal Arts Liberated
The liberal arts have long been physically bound by the classroom, but the information age has now produced solutions to communication needs. The liberal arts are all about communication and often with people outside the classroom. So, in a sense, the liberal arts have been liberated by today’s environment.
Yesterday’s Classroom
For example, students in yesterday’s classrooms could learn everything they needed with-in the 4 walls of the classroom and then go into the workforce and apply it. Today information is changing so rapidly that the information is outdated before the students get through their 2nd year of college. 54% of the incoming workforce will leave their first job within a year and can be expected to change careers 14 times in their lifetime. Today, students and educators needed to think beyond jobs, beyond careers and beyond the 4 walls of the classroom.
Today’s Answer
Students need a greater level of initiative and desire to plunge through the increase in information, but they also need experience with relationships and teamwork to overcome obstacles and combine information into easy to use and comprehensible formats. There is a heightened need to broadly apply information and technology while it is applicable and stay with the cutting edge. Students must learn and apply with people that are out there operating as professionals on the cutting edge, applying and developing new ideas.
In order to make dialogue-time and instruction worthwhile for experts, students must do three things:
1: Broaden knowledge base
2: Increase epiphany rate
3: Master relationship skills
The liberal arts have not just been liberated by innovation but by need. When the need of a thing increases, its value also increases as well as its reason for being. The liberal arts like factories have been constricted by elitism and the 4 walls of the classroom. Like the factories of yesterday the “liberal arts” are being liberated today.
The Ideal and likely Impossible Classroom Experience
The ideal classroom may only be inadequately described theoretically. Each student would listen to the others and fully understand. Each student would project so that everyone was transformed from their presence alone. The momentum would increase between classes and the group would prepare for a whole new transformation each time they met.
Ideally there would be peace and order, everyone would be speaking at the same time and be fully understood by everyone else. All would learn and internalize everything at their highest potential and be able to do more the next time.
Each student would leave the mental and emotional experience tired. Many would have healthy headaches, as would take place in muscles when resistance training with an experienced trainer at a gym, only in this case muscles would build with mental exercises and with multiple trainers (other students).
True Story:
An Experience with Independent Thinkers
I began college at a small college in the mountains of Southern Utah now George Wythe University. Through unexpected chance, I found myself at a GWU steering committee meeting early in my college years; the school was only seven years old. This was a meeting which included powerful business men from all over the Western United States, gathered for the purpose of assisting the college as they transitioned into a new phase. There were about twenty men and women present most of which were 25-40 years in age. Each of the men had proven themselves and, as I found out shortly, they were all powerful leaders at critical junctures of the meeting.
I witnessed a phenomenon which, while often occurring in big-business executive rooms, I believe occurs very seldom in the classroom. Everyone present had his own unique way of contributing, some were scribbling madly on yellow legal pads, others were pacing the room rapidly; I suppose it activated their brains. Still others left the room periodically to process ideas or to discuss an idea with a colleague. This continued for hours only interrupted for short moments by the school’s founder to interject vision. I watched as a man went into the corner and repeatedly threw a ball against the wall, others were just sitting there in thought, elbows on the table, looking down with their heads resting in their hands.
The air was rigid with excitement. One after another they would go to the front of the room and fill the board with ideas about the value of a Rolodex or explain a trend. Toward the end of the day we were short on time, I was the scribe for the group scribbling notes as fast as I could, and there seemed to be limitless loose ends and only fifteen minutes left. Suddenly a Franklin Covey associate, stepped forward, made several categories on the recently cleaned board. Everyone was given an assignment and the meeting came to a close.
They actually listened to each other without becoming dependent. This kicked off my liberal arts education and the experience has become an example to me of what I consider an ideal classroom experience. I can now imagine youth who are comfortable with themselves, contributing to the class and moving together in common discovery; respecting each other and moving toward solutions to real inquiry and real concerns about other students, and their communities and the world.
JAAA makes it doable and fun
These men were experienced; they could sort out relevant information when people were all talking at once. They already had the seasoned confidence and assertiveness required to interject at the right time with the right input. They knew how to listen and recognized when they needed help. Every dialogue included multiple variables and they calculated efficiently.
How do you replicate that kind of experience with youth when youth don’t generally have the confidence, experience or the belief it takes to contribute at that level. At JAAA students don’t have the constricting 4 walls of the class room or its 30 dependent but popular students expecting an industrial download. Step by step they will learn to listen as consultants and to speak all at once through online forums; they will practice their initiative through the ‘PR-Learning‘ method and receive a quality education.
Summary
Today we are in need of a new, liberated “liberal arts”. Students are now capable of learning more and applying what they learn to their whole selves in real-time through personal and public relations and with new technologies. The arts of living can be combined with the arts of liberty as the JAAA mission statement suggests.
We know now that freedom works for all men including elites. We know that all men can experience ‘liberalis’ and receive the education “appropriate for free men”. This then includes both the liberal and “servile arts”. John Adams said: “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” This “grand scene” continues today and with liberated educational models we can emancipate the slavish part of mankind even further yet. Come take a step into the Academy of John and Abigail, learn about the school that connects the past and the future into an incomparable solution for today.
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1 Alvin and Heidi Toffler. 2006. Revolutionary Wealth. Doubleday. 361.