Marking milestones and making meaning on the path toward college

At the age when students’ minds alight with complex thoughts, brave new theories, and evocative realizations about self and world, the Elgin Academy upper school provides the safe arena in which our students can discuss and defend, debate and declaim ideas large and small.

Upper school students gather around seminar tables to dive into classic texts from Shakespeare to Socrates with a teacher whose passion is Greek and modern tragedy. They ask pressing questions about global politics and human rights, they test the laws of thermodynamics in the science lab, they dissect ideas, lay circuitry, produce videos, serve the community, take the field, perform on the stage, and still find time to be grounded teenagers, celebrating each other’s successes.

By walking the fine line between being enthusiastically involved and over-scheduled, EA upper school students internalize the time management skills that serve them incredibly well in college. They also develop authentic, lasting relationships—with each other and with their teachers and advisors—that they use as models for healthy, productive friendships and mentorships into college and well beyond.

By the time they graduate, EA students have mastered APs and SATs, played varsity sports, fine-tuned fine arts, visited foreign lands, and realized childhood dreams. And as they embark to fine colleges and universities nationwide and internationally, they go forth as productive, conscientious, and mindful young people who continue to hone their understanding of world and self—a lifelong process that stands as the abiding gift of their Elgin Academy education.