WIsDom Begins in wonder
About Us
King Alfred Classical School is a group of home educators in Orlando, Florida, helping students better know, glorify, and enjoy God. As a Classical Christian school, we believe that education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts and the four sciences. Our group was founded to bring distinctly Christian and Classical education to the Central Florida community.
“ Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Our Namesake
King Alfred the Great—the only monarch of England to be granted the title of ‘the Great’—ruled the kingdom that became England from 871 until 899. Alfred, born in 849 as the fifth of five sons, was not destined for the throne. Tragically, all four of his brothers died young, leaving Alfred the king of a nation at only twenty-three years old. Immediately Alfred had to contend with the cause of his brothers’ deaths: the Viking invaders. For the rest of the story, please read Olive Beaupré Miller’s short biography in From the Tower Window of My Bookhouse.
We choose King Alfred as our namesake because he was a man who exemplified the values we hold most dear. As a king, he fought to defend his people’s freedom and ruled to promote their good. As a scholar, Alfred emphasized the importance of education, overseeing the translation of many great works of literature into Anglo-Saxon, including a large portion of the Bible, and requiring his nobles to study literature and educate their children. As a devout and earnest Christian, Alfred believed that “all the free-born youths of his kingdom should employ themselves on nothing until they could first read well the English Scriptures.”
Alumni Testimonials
My name is Jaden Keller, I graduated in 2022, and I blame King Alfred for quite a lot of good.
When I was first thrust into King Alfred, I had been studying at home for several years with no unified curriculum. But I did not appreciate moving to more rigorous studies. I hated how much they made us read and sing and write and speak. I hated it, for no good reason and for no reason at all other than that school was hard. Thinking and practice took a lot of real work, and the benefits eluded my perception.
But you adults know that the most beneficial things are never easy. With enough time, my exposure to all the wonderfully good things developed in me a love for them. The whole duration of upperschool I was blessed with the joys of a wonderful Drama program, a speech and debate club, Latin classes to rewire the words in my head, and a literature class that brought me through the western tradition and taught me to think like a practical philosopher. A vital gem atop this crown was a whole class dedicated to contemplating the order and the loveliness of beautiful paintings, music, and Sacred Scripture.
Because of King Alfred's tutelage, I love to think deeply about important things, to speak with excellence, to dismantle a faulty argument or narrative so we can pursue the truth; I love to perform a role with emotion, and to perform physical service with ardour. Even subjects as mundane as grammar and logic, which I foolishly thought were far too over emphasized, gave me vital skills which I use every day to pursue knowledge and truth.
I am currently attending a wonderful school called New College Franklin, where I am studying the Classical Liberal Arts. We're learning about God, life, the world, and all beautiful things. Art, science, music, mathematics, and language all come together here in perfect union. Without King Alfred's upper school studies, I wouldn't be prepared to investigate truth so carefully, and what is more, I wouldn't love it so much as I do now.
So I warn you not to let your children study the classical way... unless you want them to learn the invaluable art of critical-thinking and to come away with an ever growing love for beauty, goodness, and truth.
— Former Customer
I could write a lengthy paper describing my time at King Alfred, and the effect that it continues to have on me. But, if I had to boil down the experience to a meager paragraph, and then begin that paragraph with a single sentence, I think it would be this: studying at King Alfred awakened my loves. There is an idea in the classical tradition that education cultivates love. Its purpose extends beyond memorizing information and facts. But what does that mean? How does school cultivate love? High school pointed me to the answers found in the classical tradition and Word of God.
Classical Christian education understands our whole human nature as body, mind, and soul, created in God’s image. It also roots us in our context as members of a great tradition of thought. I realized at King Alfred that the truth is beautiful, and worthy of my love—and that I don’t have to find the truth on my own. In other words, God, who is the Truth himself, who is worthy of all our love, has revealed himself in the things that he has made, and men much wiser than me have written about it. There is a reason people we read old things; there is a reason Euclid, Plato, Homer, and Augustine have not been forgotten. I am grateful to have studied under these teachers during my time at King Alfred.
— Former Customer“We need to teach our students to gaze on the True, Good, and Beautiful so that they can gaze on Him who is most True, most Good, and most Beautiful.”
— Andrew Kern, CEO The Circe INStitute
Our Crest
The swords represent the Word of God, a Biblical symbol for the Scripture. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit.” - Hebrews 4:12. We believe that the Bible is divinely-inspired, inerrant, and, as 2nd Timothy 3:16 states, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” At King Alfred Classical, everything we do and believe is subject to the Scriptures. The downward crossed swords symbolize that the battle is already over: we are the victorious, even though we did not fight the battle.
The lily is a historic symbol for virtue. Aristotle defined virtue—in book ten, chapter nine of his Nicomachean Ethics—as “loving what is noble and hating what is base.” Education is an ordo amoris, an ordering of the loves. Young people become virtuous when their souls feed on truth, goodness, and beauty—that which they ought to love. However, it is important to keep in mind that the child is a living and eternal soul to be nourished, not a plastic product to be molded. This fits with Charlotte Mason’s first principle that “children are born persons.” The lily also reminds us of a difference between classical and progressive education: awe of the beautiful. Students should be taught to recognize true beauty and to admire it.
The live oak has historically symbolized ancient wisdom. Live oak trees often live for hundreds of years. In a similar way, King Alfred Classical prefers old things—old books to new books, old ideas and customs to new ones. And, although we treasure the wisdom we learn from our history, all wisdom is ultimately a gift from the Lord. Our oak tree has seven branches, indicating the seven liberal arts, the three language arts of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the four mathematical arts of the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) which form the basis of our curriculum.
Our Logo
Our school logo shows a crown because we want all of our students to think of themselves as kings and queens—sovereigns of their own parts of God’s Kingdom. As those who are in Christ and have received the Spirit, as Romans 8:16-17 says “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” The crown also reminds us of our namesake King Alfred the Great.
Our Curriculum
Our days together are focused on the three disciplines of the Trivium; grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. The centerpiece of our curriculum is a mastery of language arts. Our English studies (grammar, literature, composition, logic, speech and debate) and Latin studies provide the perfect pairing to equip students with a mastery of the written and spoken word. We provide optional classes in the maths and sciences.
To learn more about our philosophy of education, please click the link below to read our full statement of confidences.
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