Statement of Purpose

Waterford School provides liberal arts college preparatory education for students in Preschool through Grade 12, serving students from Salt Lake City, Holladay, Sandy, Draper, Park City, Utah County and throughout the Wasatch front. Founded in 1981, the school instills qualities of independent thought, responsibility, and service as it helps students lay a solid foundation for college and prepares them to lead purposeful and honorable lives. Parents trust Waterford to deliver the finest education based on the richness of its curriculum, the quality of its faculty, the commitment of its students, and the safety of its environment. Using classical ideals for learning and life, Waterford teachers measure their effectiveness by the growth and development of each student.

Mission

LEARNING is its reason for being, its passion, its whole point. At Waterford, students learn to learn. They are taught and encouraged to be self-reflective in their learning, to acquire a repertory of ways of learning, and to deploy them across subject matter that ranges widely and is freshly challenging. In the process students gain a self-competence that will sustain a lifetime of learning.

LEARNING is enhanced by the recognition of responsibility. Students value strong expectations that emphasize work, self-discipline, and dependability. Accountability for one’s learning further encourages the realization that learning is inherently communal and connected: that students and faculty are in it together. Though one can become accomplished as one’s own teacher, learning necessarily occurs in the context of other persons, their ideas and voices, historical and contemporary. Learning is therefore invariably indebted.

LEARNING is inescapably moral. All learning bears on living and ultimately on how best to live. Aside from the natural imperative to learn, there is also the deep responsibility to share one’s learning with others in hope that they will be lifted thereby, their lives made richer and more fulfilled. There is no end to learning nor is it itself an end. Rather, learning is the means by which mankind acquires the nobility of the well-lived life.

To pursue this affirmation, to continually engage and refine, first on its own campus with its students, faculty, and curriculum, then in the world at large, is the mission of The Waterford School.