Twenty Five Years on the Front
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.
— Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae
Given the passage of nearly a quarter of a century, it is worth pausing to consider what it is that Ridgeview is about. To understand this is to contemplate shifting attitudes about education, and the changing conceptions of childhood, parenting, and the cultural conditions that make civil and political society possible.
Ridgeview is now twenty-five years old—young for a private school, older for a charter school, and older still when one considers it is drawing on a tradition 3,000 years in the making. The pedagogy and paideia of Werner Jaeger, Gilbert Highet, Kurt Hahn, and Mortimer Adler, as well as the early E.D. Hirsch, and the spirit of John Taylor Gatto, and the anti-statism sewn into the American spirit; fiercely independent, unapologetically intellectual, driven by a desire to inculcate good character in youth, and forged in the furnace of “doing hard things,” and “learning by suffering,” whether by setting personal bests on PE tests, reading hefty tomes like Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment, flourishing in subzero temperatures, braving the stage to deliver a thesis, or conquering mountains—Ridgeview has remained steadfastly on brand and on mission.
We have been and continue to be animated by interesting people doing interesting and worthy things. Our parent community has read and discussed over 423 essays, books, and short stories. This has included everything from Alasdair MacIntyre, Benjamin Rush, Isaac Asimov, Graham Greene, Ezra Pound, Stefan Zweig, W.B. Yeats, Simone Weil, Prosper Merimée, Anthony Trollope, Italo Calvino, E.M. Forster, Edgar Allan Poe, and too many others to recount. The readings and the discussions have been of remarkable range and depth. Ridgeview has improved not only the minds of its students, but the minds of our parents and faculty—our community. We are living the life of the mind, and we are conscious in a way few other communities are in our recognition that what we want to see in our children, we should be conspicuous about developing in ourselves.
At Ridgeview, school is a mindset and an activity—not a place. Learning is the activity of school, and it often happens in classrooms, but it also happens while reading in solitude, it happens on long, arduous hikes, it happens watching a meteor shower, it happens in a museum. The only preconditions are humility, wonder, and will. We can be better and worse learners, but it is not a thing beyond any of us. Its end is wisdom and self-understanding, though we of course recognize that we are of the world and that we must know enough of it to provide for our material needs. As humane as our mission is, and as noble as our principles are, we must still manage to succeed by the world’s metrics. Fortunately, we do. In 2025, every student in an intimately taught class of twenty students who applied to college was accepted, which included acceptances to forty-seven distinct colleges and universities including two in Ireland, one in Scotland, and one in Canada. Not only were they accepted, but two-thirds of them received merit scholarships with a class total of $3,065,528. This was neither an atypical nor exceptional year. This kind of success is hard earned, but incidental to the larger project underway here.
Our ambition for our students is not simply that they will do well in college, but that they will do well in life. Our hope for them is not merely that they make money and buy things, but that they are allowed to savor their childhoods, that time is carved out for them to feel and smell the earth, to exercise their imaginations and to play with abandon, to develop the resilience and grit to endure the tumults of maturation as we all must, and to be successful according to this metric: that when they leave us, they will remain physically fit and active, that they will find meaning and purpose in their lives, that they will be of benefit to those who know and may come to depend upon them, that they will love and be loved, that they will encounter strangers and familiars with compassion and civility, that they will be an asset to their republic and communities, and that they will endeavor to never cease learning and to compound the intellectual gift given to them in their youth. We are for higher things, less temporal ones, and we are assisted in the pursuit of our ambitions by likeminded travelers wanting something similar for themselves, and by volunteers with such a diversity of knowledge and experiences that what we can do for and with students nearly always exceeds the time we are given with them.
Life is precious, and we have had the good fortune of being provided the space and the means to enjoy it and to make the most of it and of one another. If we do not understand this, we do not really understand Ridgeview. That sounds hard put, but it isn’t really because the doors of this place are flung wide open. In fact, the next twenty-five years looking like the last twenty-five will depend upon the willingness of people to take the time to understand and participate in this great and noble project. That project begins in our homes. Unlike Plato and John Dewey, and the bulk of the public education establishment, our project is not the dismantling of the family in pursuance of the state’s aims. The state, in our view, is for us; not we for it. Our standing in relation to the family bears a closer resemblance to the writings of Anthony Esolen than William Kilpatrick.
Choosing Ridgeview is not a once-made choice. You keep choosing it by your active participation and support of it. Observe classes, do some of the reading alongside your child, read together in the evenings. Let them see you reading for your own edification and enjoyment. Let them see you exercise, eat well, get sufficient sleep. Build the discipline to do well at home in order that they may do well in school. Join our reading groups—either in the hallways with students, or with parents. Attend a film night. Run in the Valborg race. Attend the Numis dinner. Contribute your time and talents. Come with us on an outdoor trip. To be on the front means to be active, and Ridgeview, alongside its parents, has transformed the lives of not only its 623 graduates, but the lives of everyone who has believed that Ridgeview should be more than just a school. Thank you to everyone, past and present, who has given a portion of themselves these last twenty-five years to improve and transform this community.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
