CURRICULUM

Teaching students to be critical thinkers

UHS offers all students a four-year college preparatory liberal-arts curriculum. “College preparatory” means we are preparing students to leave UHS to enter and be successful in any university in the country. “Liberal-Arts” means many things; it means we provide a general education that includes not only math and science but also the arts and humanities such as Latin, English, and Music. It also means we will teach students to be critical thinkers with a general understanding of the world, rather than providing them with a single, specific curriculum focus. In Science, for example, students are exposed to five sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, zoology, geology) rather than the norm at a traditional school where students take biology and chemistry and then may do further advanced work in the same subjects.

Our four-year curriculum was developed in 1999 when educators in the community came together to outline what they thought would be the best curriculum for a high school student. Music was added to the curriculum because of the research that suggested a link between student achievement and the study of music. Although Music was a required course in classical times for many different reasons, it has been less valued in modern times.

Each grade level has a curriculum that is interdependent on the other grade level courses, and the entire curriculum is articulated from grade 9 to 12. Over the years UHS has updated the curriculum and modified components to ensure its relevancy, but the heart of the curriculum is still taught to students as our founders intended. The curriculum for each grade level has been carefully articulated in the following document links and can be further accessed in the UHS office.