Be Curious About Everything

A Vision of the Academic Program

In its 1778 constitution, Phillips Academy is charged with ensuring its students learn “the great end and real business of living.” Inspired by this charge, we seek to cultivate in our students the capacities—among them analytical rigor, imaginative thought, and nuanced skepticism— necessary to identify and attain a great and worthy end: human flourishing. Our founders knew that adolescence is formative. By introducing our students to the diversity of human experience and to the complexities of the natural world, we push them to understand the world as it is. By fostering their abilities to question beliefs, systems, and the ways things are done, we press them to envision the world they seek to create.

To prepare its students for life in the world, Phillips Academy offers a liberal education. Oriented to all aspects of human experience, liberal education affirms that knowledge is intrinsically good and denies that education terminates with technical skill or professional success. Resisting specialization in favor of breadth, it initiates students into connected fields of understanding and prepares them to lead lives characterized by learning and understanding, responsibility and freedom.

The practice of responsibility and freedom demands that citizens have dispositions of the critical mind to recognize fact and valid argument and to comprehend the implications of the knowledge they produce and the things they create. It requires that citizens act against intolerance and injustice and build communities conducive to human flourishing. To help students become such citizens, Phillips Academy seeks to prepare graduates who are educated broadly, discerning of ideologies, and committed to the public good.

Our Faculty

We have hundreds of friendly, caring faculty and staff members, including more than 200 classroom teachers—nearly all of whom live on campus. They have interesting lives and complex, colorful histories. They’re versatile, inspirational, and ever-present as teachers, coaches, academic advisors, house counselors, mentors, and lifelong resources. Most of all, they were once like you: brainy, insatiably curious, multi-dimensional high school students. So they see you for who you are, and they help you discover who you’ll become.