About Camperdown
Camperdown Academy is a unique school, designed to meet the needs of the student with dyslexia. Individualized Orton-Gillingham instruction, multi-sensory classroom teaching, and attention to developing the talents of the child with dyslexia form our primary goals in educating our students.
Our Philosophy
A school should be designed for its children, their present happy growth and their soundly based future effectiveness. A school is established as a group in which people are taught or led to learn, but it is as individuals that they learn, through competency and understanding of their world.
Just as in Aldous Huxleys words, "It is no good knowing about the taste of strawberries out of a book, so each child needs to experience for himself the worlds of city and country, of nature and human culture." These become part of the child through all his or her senses, through emotional and spiritual appreciation and responsible involvement in the entire world about and within him, and by the active process of the ordered observation, problem solving, and critical thinking which we call intellectual functioning.
Each child is born with a distinctive combination of potentialities on which, by the time the child comes to school, a unique set of experiences has been at work making each a separate individual, different from all others. At the same time he or she is a member of the human family, with certain basic physical, emotional, and spiritual characteristics and needs which are shared with all of us. This makes society both necessary and possible.
A school life which promotes the healthy, vigorous, and joyful growth of the children should provide a well-planned physical setting and general program. Such dependable security gives a firm foundation and stable framework within which each child can live a cooperative and rewarding social life while he or she is developing from dependent childhood into self-reliant adolescence and adulthood.
But this provides only the background for the major interest of the school, which is the meeting of each child's specific needs and the fostering of strengths and unique talents. The plan which is best for the child is the one that enables growth toward achieving individual potentialities. For this, children need a richly varied educational experience in an environment where they feel comfortable and free from the fear of failure.
Children need careful training, too, in the basic skills which are the tools through whose use they will develop competence and a sense of confidence in achieving their educational objectives.
Tools themselves are not the goals of education, but, just as it is difficult or impossible to construct a beautiful and satisfying building without a set of well sharpened tools and the skill to use them, one cannot hope to acquire knowledge, understanding, and vocational competence without mastery of reading, writing, mathematics, and the disciplines imposed by art, drama, laboratory, and the playing field.
Children have varied degrees of talents and difficulties, so their needs differ. Wholeness of development requires that we know a child's strengths, so we may encourage him or her to use them well and know the exact nature of the child's difficulties, so we may help him or her cope successfully with them and gain a well-rounded competence as an effective person.
To achieve these goals for the school, the staff must combine wholeness of body, mind, and spirit, with a capacity for both loving acceptance and calm firmness. Effective teaching requires knowledge and enthusiasm in subject matter coupled with an astute assessment of each child's needs, capacities, and skills, teaching each one in his or her own style at his or her own pace, whether individually or in groups.
Since none of us is all-knowing, the planning and operation of the school requires not only teamwork on the campus, but consultation with outside experts when needed, cooperation of parents, and, most importantly, a spirit of involvement on the part of the children as they grow toward taking full responsibility for their own behavior and learning.
This education leads toward the full, happy, and effective living we want for each of our children and for the school community as a whole.
The experience of the good life in childhood, with the development of competence and adaptability, is the best preparation for meeting the demands of later schooling and a world of rapid change and complexity. Specific training is obsolete before it is mastered, but intellectual curiosity, skill in learning, and creative flexibility in the face of new problems are dependable resources with which to meet whatever challenge or opportunity the future may hold. These are the objectives to which Camperdown Academy has been dedicated.