We know that creativity and economic prosperity are bound together as it is creative leaders who go beyond the current levels of knowledge and understanding to bring about new ideas, questions and solutions.
“Imagine what could happen if the advanced physics student and the photography student had meaningful collisions in the average American high school. What if they did by design — if their class work wove together diverse content and skills intentionally and elegantly? What would young people see as possible? They might come to understand that the lines between music, math, physics, and art are much blurrier than textbooks make them appear. Schools could be the breeding ground for a new millennium of Renaissance young men and women where creating something trumps memorizing it.”
-Steven Turckes and Melanie Kahl. “What Schools Can Learn from Google, IDEO, and Pixar.”
Grayson has been designed precisely to create such “meaningful collisions” among bright minds with various gifted academic strengths. The curriculum level is set between one and three years above that available in typical classrooms for children of the same ages, with further flexibility available in subjects depending on need. Cross-pollination of ideas is a key element of the success of the program. The curriculum is stacked with direct instruction in core and creative subjects, student-designed projects using authentic problems and methods of exploration, as well as guided independent study — a pedagogical approach that requires students to notice and play with links and connections across the traditional separation of academic disciplines.
Grayson’s unique integration of independent study and project-based learning means that there is time set aside every day for inquiry, both guided and independent, in which students explore their own ideas and collaborate on group projects. Older students, especially, are given the freedom to concentrate on areas of passion, which allows them to gain a level of expertise in their selected fields. In this way, Grayson demands sophisticated, interdisciplinary thinking from its students in a new educational paradigm that challenges multiple avenues of perception and learning. It is an ideal environment for students who are eager to engage their brains at levels far beyond what a typical classroom can provide.
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