Dear High School Families,

As we head toward the Christmas season, and welcome the cooling weather, we also see an increase in the busyness of our schedules. Sports teams are traveling, exam pressure is building, and the holiday season looms with its joys and pressures. One of the great contradictions of the frenzied and anxious nature of modern school life is that it doesn’t live up to the roots of its name. We need to return the schole back to school. 

Dr. Christopher Perrin, one of our resources for professional development here at ICS, helpfully explains, “Schole means something like undistracted time to study the most worthwhile things with good friends, usually in a beautiful place, and usually with good food and drink.”1 This Latin root word for “school” reminds us of what schools were originally intended to be. How do we achieve undistracted, meaningful, and even leisurely study in our stressed and distracted age? This is one of the pressing questions for ICS leadership as we consider our policies and practices. There is no escaping the counter-cultural methods needed to stand against the never-ending tide of worldliness in order to pursue true excellence, which stem from virtues that can only be found and achieved in Christ.