In building the foundation for leadership, brilliance, and balance, language skills, vocabulary, recognition of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, similes, allusions, enthusiasm for classical children's literature, philosophical reasoning, geography, American history, and introduction to the arts is emphasized.
The curriculum includes, amongst others, Aesop's Fables, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, A Child's Version of Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry, Beatrix Potter, La Fontaine's Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson, A Christmas Carol, Greek and Roman Mythology, One Thousand and One Nights, King Arthur legends, and The Little Prince.
Geography teaches places, names, and the different customs, cultures, and histories of foreign nations and the American states.
American history instructs or the major events and figures that culminated in the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Philosophical reasoning elaborates on the criteria for moral and ethical judgments in public and private life. The arts are introduced by exposure to suitable classical paintings, music and sculpture.
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.- Sir Francis Bacon
Middle school Lichfield Scholars are exposed to a broader and more trenchant emporium of subjects: current events, world history, advanced American history, comparative religion, advanced vocabulary and emphasis on economical and evocative expression and analogy in composition, advanced reading in classical fiction and nonfiction, comparative government, public and private ethics, economic fundamentals, music and art appreciation, and classical drama.
Reading will include Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Women and Little Men, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, Robinson Crusoe, Candide, Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver's Travels, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Billy Budd, Rassalas, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Pathfinder, and Animal Farm; non-fiction reading will include The Autobiography of Ben Franklin, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Bruce Catton's Civil War Trilogy, and Plutarch.
High School Lichfield Scholars are provided the knowledge base and moral bearings to participate as responsible adults in public policy debates, influencing the world of ideas, and developing mature personal relations with peers and elders.
Subjects include: contemporary decisions confronting the President, Congress, the judiciary, and state legislatures; laws and public policy; political economy; themes in world history; analysis of religious texts; American state papers; World War II; the Napoleonic Wars; the Punic Wars; the Peloponnesian wars; the Civil War; the Papacy; the Holy Roman Empire; the Cold War; international trade; advanced vocabulary; composition of sentences that race like thoroughbreds, not dawdle like plow horses; dramatic arts; psychology; leadership and charisma and utopian communities such as Brooke Farm.
The reading required of High School Lichfield Scholars is taxing. Politics and history include: The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, Notes on the Constitutional Convention, the Magna Charta, Churchill's History of the Second World War, Carl Sandburg's Biography of Lincoln, Freidrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom, John Maynard Keynes, Memoirs of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, Bismarck, Disraeli, Gladstone, Margaret Thatcher, Charles De Gaulle, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Emperor Hirohito; religious texts include the Old Testament and New Testament, the Holy Koran, the Mahabharata; fiction includes War and Peace, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's Tragedies, Dickens, Hawthorne, Hugo, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Washington Irving, William James, Lives of the Popes, Sam Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Moliere, and Goethe.
The College Lichfield Scholar is prepared for political, business, intellectual, and ethical leadership.
There is only one good, knowledge,and one evil, ignorance.- Socrates
The curriculum builds on the High School model plus case presentations testing the Lichfield Scholar's ability to think and act decisively and trenchantly under strict time limits, for example, President Harry Truman's decisions to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; instruction on writing letters to the editor and columns for major newspapers, and delivering simulated speeches before Congress.
Required fiction reading includes: Shakespeare, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Ben Johnson, Cornelle, Voltaire, Rousseau; required religious and philosophical reading include precepts of Buddhism, Mahatma Ganh3dhi, Edmund Burke, Nietzsche, Sir Thomas More, Confucius, Karl Marx, Lenin.
Required political and history readings include the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the Spanish Civil War, Mao Zedong, Pope John Paul II, the Life of George Washington, John Marshall, James Madison, Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Darrow, the Scopes Trial, the Life and Times of Joseph McCarthy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and the histories of England, France, Germany and Italy.