The Alberta Classical Academy is a public charter school division currently serving grades K-9. Our tuition-free classical education programs provide students with an academically rigorous and traditional liberal arts education, equipping them with the virtues, knowledge, and habits befitting free citizens.
2025/26 new student applications & open houses
The application portal for the 2025/26 school year will open this fall. Before applying, families are strongly encouraged to attend an open house to learn more about our program philosophy, approach to curriculum delivery, and expectations for students.
What is a classical education?
A classical education aims to preserve, transmit, and build upon the wisdom of past generations — not to dismantle or repudiate it. Our approach relies on knowledge-rich curricula and teacher-led classrooms, and is centred on great and beautiful works of art, literature, and philosophy. Through the study of classical works from around the world, students nurture a sense of philosophical wonder. They learn to inhabit different perspectives, think deeply about life’s most fundamental questions, and develop intellectual, moral, and aesthetic discernment.
Although academically rigorous, a true liberal arts education is not limited to making students narrowly useful or equipping them for material success. Recalling Confucius, we hold that “an educated person is not a tool.” Children are not merely future workers; they are future friends, spouses, neighbours, parents, and citizens. They are bearers of souls, which thirst after knowledge of what is true, good, and enduring. A classical education prepares students not only to live, but to live virtuously and with purpose.
Our Difference
Knowledge-rich liberal arts curriculum
Emphasis on virtue and character development
Centred on classic works of art, literature, & philosophy
Low-tech, smartphone-free environment
Outdoor education programs
French, Mandarin, and Latin language options
A culture of open inquiry, leisure, and truth-seeking
“There is really only one liberal study that deserves the name — because it makes a person free — and that is the pursuit of wisdom.”
— Seneca
FAQs
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Alberta charter schools are public, tuition-free programs with unique philosophical or pedagogical approaches. They operate independently from the central bureaucracy of large district school boards, being governed instead by autonomous non-profit organizations. This allows us to offer exceptional educational experiences to all interested students, regardless of background, postal code, or income level.
Alberta is currently the only Canadian province with charter schools. Click here for more information on Alberta’s charter schools.
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We welcome pupils from all socio-economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, and offer a community founded on friendship, conversation, respect for human dignity, and a shared love of wisdom.
Our program is demanding, both academically and in its expectations for student behaviour. It is intended for learners who are committed to seeking moral and intellectual excellence.
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Alberta Classical Academy schools are tuition-free public charter schools. We do not charge any tuition for program instruction.
Like other public schools, however, pupils are required to provide a small instructional resource fee. Additional fees may apply for enrichment activities such as field trips and extracurricular programming that are not funded by the Alberta Ministry of Education.
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Charter schools in Alberta are non-sectarian, and are not affiliated with any particular faith tradition.
However, we aim to provide an environment that is respectful of children and families’ faith practices, supports students’ moral formation, and orients them toward what is true, good, and enduring.
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We deliver the Alberta provincial programs of study using a distinct, classical approach and philosophy. For example:
• Students will study classical works of literature, philosophy (including sciences and mathematics), history, and art. Where possible, they will rely on primary texts and sources of information.
• The pursuit of truth, beauty, and wisdom informs the approach to curriculum delivery, with an explicit goal of developing pupils’ capacity for clear reasoning and sound moral, intellectual, and aesthetic judgement.
• The curriculum shall be delivered in accordance with the “trivium” progression, in which the emphasis shifts through the stages of grammar in elementary school, logic/dialectic in middle school, and rhetoric in upper secondary school.
• To the extent possible, subjects will be highly integrated and coherent both vertically (across grades) and horizontally (across disciplines).
• In teaching sciences and maths (the classical ‘quadrivium’), we approach these as humane liberal arts, which illuminate the laws and ordering of the cosmos (for a fuller explanation, click here)
We will also be developing our own, unique programs of study to supplement the Alberta curriculum. To view our K-12 curriculum map, visit our curriculum page.
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