See what our Alumni are saying about Tall Oaks!
Christian Principles — Classical Methods — Amazing Results
Comments from Alumnus Jonathan Williams - Class of 2009
Comments from Alumnus Carly Winstead - Class of 2009Tall Oaks emphasizes the importance of giving its students an education that begins and ends with Christ. God tells us in Revelation 21 that He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. We are taught that all of our subjects cohere because Christ is at their center. Our teachers here understand this and incorporate it into how they teach their respective subjects, striving to show us the relationship each subject has to every other subject. We are shown the connection between God’s relevance in mathematics, art class, and even physical education. God is the God of all of it." Jonathan Williams, Class of 2009
"Each student encourages other students in their school work, in their walk with God and in whatever sport the Titans are playing...The learning experience here is challenging but extremely engaging and rewarding to the students as there is a common theme in every class to know more about God and the plans He has for each of us. In my years at Tall Oaks I have been challenged and pushed to do my best, I have been nurtured in the most important areas of life; knowing God and how to live for Him using invaluable tools received through an amazing education." Carly Winstead, Class of 2009
Listen to Alumnus Chris Brearly - Class of 2008 - as he reads his essay for his Freshman Honors English class on the Penn State University Radio spot (April 2009)
Comments from Alumnus Brant Hauser - Class of 1998
What I found in college classrooms were high school graduates with little or no idea how to process the information given to them. Their learning process mimicked the learning process our first graders employ at Tall Oaks. Listen. Memorize. Repeat. Even more apparent was their lack of ability to piece together a sound logical argument, much less a coherent sentence. Let me remind you that these observations impressed me while I was in the honors program. These students were supposed to be Delaware’s best and brightest. My favorite example came in an honors colloquium class entitled “Freedom and Equality”. The class was meant to be a relatively open forum discussion on the difficulties in simultaneously enforcing both freedom and equality in a society. It was a disaster. Time after time the students would come in to class having read the assignments, most of which were the founding documents of this country, and having absorbed none of the meaning. This course was nothing more than a volley of canned arguments the students had heard elsewhere. Prodding them for any explanation would yield a repeat of the argument at a higher volume. This was a class with two students who had scored 1600 on their SATs. Believe me now when I say that being “smart” had nothing to do with thriving in that setting. The tools to learn that were instilled in me at Tall Oaks were what enabled my comprehension of the subject and my ability to discuss it intelligently. This was a theme that I found threaded through my years of undergraduate and graduate studies at both the University of Delaware and the University of Idaho. Whether it was English 101 or Honors Chemistry or my architectural thesis, I found myself thankful to God for the meager four years I had here learning about more than just the grammar of life. Those “archaic classics” that I read at Tall Oaks that I never thought would be applicable, are nothing short of the finest lessons history has to teach. Brant Hauser, Tall Oaks Class of 1998
Comments from Alumnus Iain Roush - Class of 2004
The task of any musician who is worth his salt is to take the great ideas translated by the composer into notes and emotion and to make them immanent and appealing to any listener. This is where one has to be able to dialogue with those foundational ideas and to process them into something meaningful so one does not become another talking head or simply add to the meaningless noise so very prevalent in our contemporary society. There are two examples that come to mind when thinking about this concept. The first would be from my weekly guitar lessons that serve as the centerpiece of my Peabody education. I have had the extreme good fortune to be studying with a man who could serve as a living compendium of Western achievements in thinking. In a lesson he may approach a piece of music from a work of Sophocles, from the philosophy of Heidegger or perhaps the opening of the Book of John. Because of classical studies in Greek literature and Greek language, from philosophical surveys in classes such as Christian Apologetics, and obviously from the Biblical underpinning to everything in the Tall Oaks curriculum, these are all ideas that are familiar to me and can be readily integrated into understanding the music I am playing. And what’s more, I’ve been given the framework to understand that these ideas are not discrete ideas that have no connection to one another, but can be arranged into a larger worldview. The production of a note can be a finger crossing a string or pushing a key, or it can be nothing passing into being or a word becoming embodied in sonic flesh…
…When I was leading a class in which we were discussing the Confessions of St. Augustine, I overheard one of my fellow guitarists asked, “What does St. Augustine have to do with music? How is this making me a better musician?” The question gave me pause for quite a few days and didn’t seem entirely invalid. But I finally came to the conclusion that what St. Augustine had to do with music was everything. He says, “My heart is restless until it rests in you.” What Augustine is talking about is the foundation for everything we do and music, or art in general, is a recognition of the frailty of beauty in a fallen world and is striving to echo and make manifest the beauty and truth of God and to share it with others. Iain Roush, Tall Oaks Class of 2004