Our Vision Statement…

Our vision at The Balanced Scholar 30A is to equip children with the tools and resources needed to to make up for the knowledge deficits that are prevalent throughout the United States today. We envision a nation where students can all achieve on a leveled playing field when given the opportunities, the vocabulary, and the background knowedge that a culturally literate citizen inhabits. Knowledge is power and we can gain it and then give it away through a series of ideas that assist students in becoming knowledge makers and knowledge knowers.

Children cannot be truly literate without knowing about history, science, art, music, literature, civics, geography, and more. Indeed, they cannot satisfactorily comprehend what they read unless they possess the background knowledge that makes such comprehension possible. Yet most American primary schools have been marching in the opposite direction: treating reading only as a "skill" and pushing off history, science, art, and music "until later."

This problem grows more serious with the advent of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, which take for granted that children expected to meet those standards are being supplied with a content-rich curriculum. In far too many U.S. schools, however, that is simply not happening.