The most important thing your child needs to know is how to learn new skills.
The Internet gives your child near-instantaneous access to all of the world’s information. If they need to know the capital of Austria, Google can tell them. If they want to investigate Columbus’ boats, the Internet can show them diagrams of their inner structure and discover the effort in 1988 to design and construct one of the ships from scratch. With the Internet, information is everywhere and it is free. Your child doesn’t need to memorize the “information.”
To succeed in our rapidly changing world, students need to develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. They need to learn communication and collaboration skills. They need to develop their creativity, become media literate and technologically literate, and improve their life and career skills. They need to be able to adapt to change and be flexible. They need to develop their organizational and time-management skills. They have to become independent thinkers and doers, and self-directed learners. They need to acquire the social skills to interact effectively with others and work effectively with a diverse team. In short, to succeed in the 21st century, they don’t need to learn more information. They need to develop 21st century skills.
Which is why, instead of sending your child to a math class or English class, we use a unique framework of Learning Goals to guide the creation of your child’s personalized curriculum.
The Learning Goals
- Empirical Reasoning will help your child think like a scientist and give them the skills to prove that something is true.
- Quantitative Reasoning will help your child think like a mathematician and strengthen their ability to use numbers to evaluate and solve the kinds of complex problems that their generation will have to face.
- Social Reasoning will help your child think like an historian and anthropologist and open them up to the systems that govern the world and the cultures that populate it.
- Communications will help your child effectively take in and express ideas and use technology to demonstrate what they know.
- Personal Qualities will help your child understand what they bring to this process and ask they to take steps to enhance their community.
Everything your child does at LiHigh School will be addressed towards one or more of these Learning Goals, but it will always come from their unique interests and passions and always work to improve one or more of their 21st century skills.
For example, if your child is interested in creative writing, the Quantitative Reasoning part of their Learning Plan might see them applying statistical analysis to the evolution of literature, while Empirical Reasoning might ask them to write a short story that demonstrates their understanding of the scientific process. For Communications, maybe they’ll create a blog where they comment on recent developments in the publishing industry. For Social Reasoning, maybe they’ll write a paper that compares the impact of Gutenberg’s printing press with the advent of the World Wide Web. And for Personal Qualities, maybe they’ll lead a writing workshop in their local library that helps them develop their self-confidence and their leadership skills.
But here’s the best part: if your child is interested in — say, astronomy — rather than creative writing, then your child’s Learning Plan will be completely different.
That’s what makes us different. At LiHigh School, your child’s education is absolutely unique to them.
Find out how it works.