Religious affiliation(s) Roman Catholic Director Dr. Mary Kay Clark Enrollment 11,000 Founder Anne Carroll Colors Blue, Gold | Established 1980 Grades K–12 Phone +1 540-636-9990 Founded 1980 | |
Type Private, Coeducational Homeschool Address 1350 Progress Dr, Front Royal, VA 22630, USA Similar Seton Testing Services, Seton Educatio Media, Warren County High Sch, Randolph Academy, Christend College | ||
Seton home study school catholic homeschooling
Seton Home Study School is a full-service homeschool curriculum provider and book publisher. Headquartered in Front Royal, Virginia, Seton has around 27,000 enrolled students, including students in every U.S. state and over 50 countries. Seton Press books are used by many thousands of homeschoolers not enrolled in Seton’s school, and also by several private Catholic schools who essentially use Seton’s curriculum in the classroom. Nationally accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Seton has a reputation for high academic standards.
Contents
History
In 1975, Anne Carroll, the wife of Christendom College founder Warren Carroll, started a Catholic school in Manassas, Virginia called Seton High School. The emphasis Mrs. Carroll placed on integrating the Catholic faith into the curriculum was unusual for the time, and soon many parents who did not live near the school were requesting admission by correspondence. Realizing the potential for the correspondence concept to expand, Mrs. Carroll asked Dr. Mary Kay Clark, an educator from Ohio, to come to Virginia as the Director of an independent K-12 Seton Home Study School. Dr. Clark became the Director of Seton in 1985 and moved the Home Study School to Front Royal, VA with a total enrollment of less than one hundred students. The two schools have developed independently since that time.
Seton’s curriculum was largely based upon reproducing textbooks which had been used in the Catholic school system in the 1950s. Textbooks published in the 60’s and after didn’t have the same focus on the Catholic faith which Seton was trying to provide. Seton eventually began to write some of their own books, and by the mid 1990s began to publish color textbooks in earnest. Encouraged by Dr. Mary Kay Clark’s eldest son and Seton’s Vice-President, Ken Clark, Seton soon became the largest publisher of Catholic textbooks in the English language. Currently, Seton still uses a few books from outside publishers in its curriculum, but the vast majority of materials are from Seton Press. With the new possibilities available though the internet, Seton has created a wide array of online resources for enrolled students through its web portal “MySeton.”
Seton had experienced exponential growth ever since its founding. In the 1980s, homeschooling was still a relatively unknown phenomena. Seton strongly believed in the benefit homeschooling could provide for families, not only because of the superior formation in the Catholic Faith that it could offer, but by strengthening families. Dr. Clark began to travel across the country hosting Catholic homeschooling conferences to introduce new families to homeschooling. As homeschooling in general became more accepted in society, Seton’s enrollment gradually swelled to its current number of 11,000 enrolled students.
Method and philosophy
Seton’s educational method is sometimes referred to as the Scholastic Method. This term is derived from the Latin “scholasticus” which means “of or pertaining to the school.” There is not much difference between Seton’s method and the method that had formerly been used by the Catholic school system. The term “Scholastic” can also refer to the philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas whose philosophy provides something of a basis for Seton’s educational theory.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, every child (and adult) learns by abstracting universal ideas from sense data. This kind of abstraction can take place in two ways, either by discovery or by instruction. When discovery occurs, a person randomly comes across sense data and recognizes some universal elements between the different objects he sees. For instance, after looking at a picture of the Great Pyramids of Giza, someone might notice that when a triangle has sides that are the same size, it also has angles that are the same degree. When instruction occurs, another person who already possesses an idea explains it to one who does not yet understand it by means of arranging sense data in such a way as to highlight the desired principle. Thus, a geometry textbook is designed to have illustrations of equilateral triangles pointing out the correlation of sides to angles. Either way, a student can only gain knowledge when he abstracts the universal idea for himself, but instruction is a much more efficient way to acquire knowledge. Child-directed learning is essentially just discovery, whereas teacher/parent-directed learning is instruction.
The Scholastic Method is an instruction based method primarily distinguished by its emphasis on the use of textbooks, which are designed to help the student, in the easiest possible way, grasp important ideas and concepts.
Curriculum
Unlike some other homeschooling programs, Seton is fully accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, meaning that those enrolled students who graduate from Seton's high school program receive a diploma. If a student is enrolled with Seton, quarterly tests and assignments must be sent in for grading, although parent-graded items may comprise part of the student's grade as well.
Seton requires twenty-two credits to graduate from high school, with each credit representing a year taken in a given subject. The required courses are as follows:
In addition a minimum of 3 elective credits must be taken. These electives can be from available courses in the subject areas of business education, computers, English, science and health, social sciences, and mathematics.