MISSION STATEMENT

In an educational alliance with the family, Stella Maris schools promote the flourishing of each student through building virtues in a story of friendship with Christ.

THE FOUNDATION OF OUR EDUCATIONAL VISION

Friendship with Christ makes our life free, beautiful and great.

CORE BELIEFS

1.  Education consists of helping the student flourish in each different stage of his life.

• Each student is unique and unrepeatable with his talents and vocation.
• Flourishing involves integrating all the dimensions of the person (bodily, spiritual, affective, intellectual and relational).
• The end (telos) of this blossoming through education is a full life in which the light, the genius, the artist, the hero, and the saint that each student carries within himself may emerge.

2. Education requires an educational covenant between the child, his parents, the teachers and the consecrated.

• Interpersonal relationships are a vital, albeit indirect, dimension of the student’s formal education.
• Parents are the primary educators of their children; teachers and priests/religious are witnesses to a truth that is greater than themselves.
• The educational alliance seeks to educate the child in his constitutive relationships (son, brother, friend, etc.), in order to bring to fullness his vocation to love (spouse, parent, religious).

3. Education in virtues through pedagogical practices is essential to shape the desires of the child.

• Through age-appropriate pedagogical practices, the student learns to desire what is good and true and put it into practice.
• Virtues are acquired progressively through the curriculum that includes rites of passage and promises.
• The path of growth includes developing intellectual and moral virtues that integrate academic excellence and character formation.

4. The narrative method shapes the imagination of the student, opening him to a great and beautiful life.

• The narrative Method demands the relational protagonism of the student in the development of his own story.
• Through stories and tales, the student learns the unity of life (narrative intelligence).
• Through stories and tales, the student receives an ideal of the good life and models of excellence that inspire his moral imagination and integrate his affectivity.

5. Integral wisdom finds its keystone and foundation in the student’s relationship with Jesus Christ and his relationships with others.

•  In the subjects of science, math, and humanities, the student becomes able to recognize unity, dynamic order, and beauty. These characteristics are divine fingerprints evidencing God’s harmonious creation of the world and the love with which He willed to weave together the whole of creation with His chief creation, i.e., mankind.
• Science, math, and humanities find their hermeneutic key in theology because theology is the prism through which we receive all knowledge and discover the path to wisdom.
• In friendship with Christ (charity) a new way of seeing reality is generated (sacramental vision) and the vocation to love matures.