Paideia High School is a multi-district innovative public school program that provides a challenging and unique educational opportunity. Paideia’s rigorous program helps students develop their intellectual skills and knowledge base so they can begin the journey to becoming well-educated citizens and lifelong learners. PAIDEIA’S ORIGINS
Paideia High School was made available by ESHB 2913, a bill w
hich allows two or more non-high school districts to form an interdistrict cooperative high school. Paideia lets high school students remain in their resident district and enroll in a program that is theme-focused, multifaceted, accelerated and creative. Adler's "The Paideia Proposal," strives to provide the best education for all. Delivery is diverse and flexible, meeting the many needs of students. PAIDEIA HIGH SCHOOL PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
“Education is a cooperative art involving the life-long formation of a person’s intellect and will for the betterment of the person and society.”
A COOPERATIVE ART
Education is the art most noble because it considers unique aspects of the human soul. The word art is taken not in its common usage meaning what is produced but, rather, in the sense of the skills all humans possess to be both artist and medium. Education is an art because it embraces each of the three types of art: liberal, useful, and fine. The liberal arts traditionally include grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The first three, classically called the trivium, we now call the language arts of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, and persuading. The latter four, classically called the quadrivium, we now call the scientific arts of observing, estimating, measuring, experimenting, calculating, and problem-solving. Education is a cooperative art of which there are traditionally three: farming; healing; and teaching. All who deal in growing, medicine, and education practice the cooperative arts. In each, the practitioner works with nature to produce something beyond what would result from nature alone. Each cooperates with the medium of life. (include life-long learning notation here)
The fine arts are those in which the work is not a means but an end. Thus, fine is Latin, not English, and the sense is more in the English word final than fine. Education, then, includes formation of the uniquely human ability to appreciate beauty as an end in itself. FORMATION OF THE INTELLECT AND WILL
The intellect and will are unique aspects of the human soul. Philosophically, the term soul refers to the life inherent in any living thing. This life is formed, at least in part, by nature. As we have seen, the cooperative artist influences such formation. Thus, formation, within the context of an educational philosophy founded on the dignity and freedom of each human person, refers to formation of an embodied human soul unique in its aspects of intellect and free will. BETTERMENT OF THE PERSON
The human person is rational and free. Consequently, education aims at formation of the intellectual and moral virtues seeking the true, that the intellect may understand it, the good, that the will may choose it, and the beautiful, that the soul may hope for it. The intellectual and moral virtues formed by education include knowledge, understanding, wisdom, prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. BETTERMENT OF SOCIETY
The human person is also social. Therefore, education aims at formation of the social virtues seeking the common good, that each person may nurture it through the family, which is the first school of social virtue, through culture, associations, public and private institutions, government, and the whole of society. The social virtues sought through education include friendship, collegiality, good citizenship, active cooperation, civic involvement, social justice, and peace.
