Does this sound like your child?
Asks many questions, often deep and searching ones.
Thinks, feels and experiences the world with curiosity and empathy.
Gravitates to other deep thinkers.
Passionately pursues a topic of interest.
Defends a position or perspective with conviction and supporting detail.
Finds joy in creative and individual expression.
If you recognize your child in this description, they would be in good company here.
The answer
That requires the synergy of three factors.
Whether the work is challenging and engaging enough to be worth doing.
Whether an adult is close enough to support and stretch each student with genuine care and attention.
Whether the other students in the room are similarly engaged and inspired.
Our approach
Each trimester is built around a deep-dive topic that combines literature, history, inquiry and investigation. We favor depth over breadth for its ability to engage and inspire a curious mind.
Our project-based learning approach draws on students’ natural inquisitiveness to inspire collaboration, deeper understanding and work that spans multiple disciplines.
The guidance
By design, our teachers know each student well: how they think, what excites them, and where their next challenge lies. That knowledge lets each teacher find the balance of challenge and support each learner needs, so that every student is inspired to rise to their full potential.
Doing that well takes real expertise in how bright children learn, and genuine care for who they are. A close-knit classroom gives our teachers the room to bring both to every student, every day.
The peer group
A child who asks the question nobody else thought to ask needs peers who love to do the same.
Children learn in community here, alongside other inspired and original thinkers, while each is known individually. We nurture their inquisitiveness by creating a connected learning community and giving them work with real questions to uncover. One student offers an idea, another pushes it forward, and yet another takes it somewhere neither of them expected. Our students push each other further, within a supportive community of adults who nurture and guide them.
An ordinary Tuesday
This is what a day here actually looks like
A second grader finishes the morning’s math in ten minutes. Instead of a worksheet, her teacher hands her a question she won’t finish in a week. She stops asking to go to recess.
“Done early” is where the real learning starts.
By ten, a science lesson has left the building entirely. The tide is out, and a question about what lives under the rocks is about to take the rest of the morning.
Some of our best classrooms have no walls.
One school, three programs
“It used to be that she would never talk about school. Now she brings it up all the time.”
5:1
Students to teachers
K–8
One community, nine engaging years
WASC
Accredited
Where this leads
Knox graduates leave knowing who they are, how they think, what inspires them to learn and engage, and, very often, what they hope to do with it. Over the past decade Knox alumni have gone on to a wide range of public and private Santa Barbara high schools, and from there to colleges, universities and paths that are genuinely their own, including engineering, business, aviation and professional sports. What stays with us is less where they land and more that they arrive somewhere new knowing how they want to be and what they hope to become.
Stories from inside the school
A window into daily school life. What our students are working on, musings about the joys of teaching our learners, and exciting happenings within the school and community.
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