11th Grade Curriculum
As adolescents enter the second half of their high school career, generalizations about their development become increasingly difficult; the strokes must grow ever broader. "Sweet Sixteen", however, is a typical time of new-found depths to the inner life of thoughts, feelings, and deeds. Deeper -- and more individualized -- questions may begin to burn; often this is the year in which students feel the urge either to change schools or even to drop out of school altogether.
In these inner promptings, a new and urgent voice speaks: "Leave behind what you have been given," it says, "and get on with your own journey!" Outer statements of growing independence abound also: in dress, hairstyles, the pursuit of part-time jobs, and that most exciting token of maturity -- the driving license.
The curriculum for the junior year allows students to cut free to a greater degree from their peers and set off on their own uncharted course into the invisible recesses of life within. In some way, the junior year curriculum could be characterized by this theme of invisibility: namely, by the study of those subjects that draw the student into areas not accessible to the experience of our senses. Such a journey requires a new type of thinking -- thinking not entirely anchored in what our senses give us -- and a confidence is needed that this type of thinking will not lead us astray.
In literature, this journey to an invisible source is captured in the main lessons devoted to the Grail legends and to Dante's Commedia. Other subjects, however, call upon similar powers. In chemistry, the students enter the invisible kingdom of the atom (invisible because, by definition, one cannot "see" atoms); in physics, they explore the invisible world of electricity (which we can see only in its effects, not in its inherent nature); in history, they relive Medieval and Renaissance times in which men and women set off on individual quests and journeys to destinations unknown (and, in some cases, unknowable); in projective geometry, we follow parallel lines to the point they share in the infinite -- a point which can be thought even though it cannot be seen.
In summary, like the horizon that beckoned to Columbus, calling him to venture beyond its visible edge, the dimensions of the classroom are vastly enlarged in the junior year to embrace the furthest reaches of the student's own imagination and interests. In all of these subjects, the student is launched into more ambitious individual projects and research assignments.
These voyages to the invisible landscapes pose a central question intended to strengthen the student's powers of independent analysis and abstract theorizing. The question is: Why? Why are things this way? Why did the events of history take this or that course? And even deeper "why" questions --"Why am I here?": questions of destiny, life's meaning, social responsibility -- may find their way into the classroom at this stage.
