Those who have read the dialogues of Plato and who have attended a Humane Letters seminar will have noticed that the two differ in some ways. Their common feature, though, is their emphasis on inquiry as the device through which ideas are explored. A key idea or assignment might require that the teacher present material to the class, but the forward progress of the class through the ideas it explores is driven by the questions that the teacher asks of the students, the answers that they give, and the further questions that those answers inspire. In that sense, then, the school certainly follows a Socratic model.Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.

The uniforms that students wear at Archway Classical Academy are intended as constant reminders to the students that we do not derive our identity from what we wear; rather, we derive it from what we believe, say, and do. In a similar sense, then, the school itself derives its identity from the beliefs and actions that form its mission and identity, rather than from its buildings and façade, which speaks only in a very limited way about who we really are, what we really are, as a school.