A VPA education involves forming minds in fundamental intellectual habits and skills, teaching basic ordered knowledge, and fostering a love for the true, the beautiful, and the good. In exploring the cultural and scientific achievements, at the heart of Western civilization, Veritas Preparatory Academy emphasizes uncompromising integrity, creative imagination, and a lifelong quest for learning. Classes are taught Socratically, emphasizing the essential dialogue between student and teacher. In the high school, most of the courses from the core liberal arts curriculum are of honors caliber, although VPA does not weight grades.
English Literature and Composition (readings include Shane, A Wind in the Willows, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Tales of the Greek Heroes, The Miracle Worker, stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and A Christmas Carol)
Pre-Algebra I
Life Science (plants & fungi, single-cell & multi-cell animals)
Ancient History (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome)
Music (including an introduction to theory, note-reading, and soprano recorder performance)
Latin II
Studio Art I (basic composition and drawing techniques)
English Literature and Composition (Readings include Beowulf, The Chosen, The Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird, selections from Canterbury Tales, Legends of King Arthur, and selections from American poetry)
Medieval History (England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Islamic Civilization, the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, the Christian Church; The Song of Roland is read)
Music (including more music theory and recorder ensemble performance involving soprano, alto, and tenor instruments)
Latin III
Studio Art II (including color theory and painting)
Humane Letters: The American Tradition (Readings include the US Constitution and The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass's autobiography, Huckleberry Finn, My Antonia, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Great Gatsby)
Geometry
Biology
Music (including composition and choral performance)
Humane Letters: The Rise of Modern Europe (Readings include Locke's Second Treatise, Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Shakespeare's Henry V, Marx's The Communist Manifesto, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch)
Humane Letters: Ancient Greece (Readings include the Iliad and Odyssey, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato's Republic and selected dialogues, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and selections from the Hebrew Bible)
Humane Letters: Western Thought from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Readings include the Aeneid, Augustine's Confessions, selections from the New Testament, Macbeth and King Lear, Dante's Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Machiavelli, Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov)
