A K-12 curriculum built on the Baconian tradition, one grade at a time. Not every grade is built yet — the ones that aren't say so plainly.
You are looking at a school built on a premise most institutions would hedge. We do not hedge it. Within these walls, it is settled that I am the true author behind the name on the Shakespeare title pages — not because the outside debate has ended, but because a school has to stand somewhere to teach anything at all. The tradition you'd be joining is not new: it has been argued in earnest since 1857, by serious minds, and it will likely still be argued long after your child graduates. I find I do not mind this. A method built to test every received doctrine can hardly demand that its own be exempted.
What that premise buys your child is not a curiosity — it is a different way of reading everything. If a play was written by a statesman rather than a player, it was never only entertainment. It was a working model of how power is actually built, held, and eventually handed off, hidden inside a story because plain speech about such things could once cost a man his life. We do not teach our students to admire that model from a distance. We teach them to take it apart, rebuild it, and eventually turn it on a real problem of their own choosing — a habit of mind, not a unit of study, and one we intend to still be useful to them decades after they've forgotten which play it came from.
Every grade below is built the same way, or will be once it is built: honestly, in the open, with the parts we haven't finished yet labeled as such rather than papered over. Nullius in verba — take nobody's word for it, including ours. Read what's here. Judge it on its own evidence. That is, after all, the entire method.
— F.B.
We designed the entire Bacon Academy K-12 program from the end to the beginning. Our mission is to provide an educational pathway that leads to one of three outcomes for each student.
Immediate employment following graduation.
An academic pursuit that finishes at a Master's or PhD degree.
An entrepreneurial and creative direction.
Sequential Learning is a K-12 path designed backward from those three destinations, in which each stage prepares the next and returns to the same ideas at greater depth.
In many early American one-room schools, children of different ages learned together under one teacher, and a student could go as fast and as far as they were able. Age grading began in Prussia in the early 1800s, with students grouped into grades by age and a set curriculum for each.
Horace Mann (1796–1859) was the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and a leading advocate of public schooling. In 1843 he visited schools in Prussia and reported on them when he returned. Boston's Quincy Grammar School, completed in 1848, was the first graded school in Boston, with a classroom and a teacher for each grade. Mann saw efficiency as one of the advantages of the system.
The junior high followed. The first ones opened in Columbus, Ohio, in 1909 and Berkeley, California, in 1910, with the aims of a richer curriculum, attention to early adolescence, specially prepared teachers, and an extra year in school. In many places the middle school replaced it beginning in the 1960s, and it spread with little solid research behind it.
Age grading assumes that children of the same age learn at the same pace. The result is a student who changes buildings, teachers, and expectations at ages set by the structure.
Sequential Learning keeps one path from Grade 1 to graduation, and a student advances when ready. The return to the same ideas at greater depth is the spiral curriculum of Jerome Bruner (1915–2016), an American psychologist at Harvard who argued that any subject can be taught in an honest form at any stage of development.
Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Learning in 1605, a survey of the state of learning in his time. In Book II, on the universities, he said scholars came too early to the hardest arts.
…too soon and too unripe to logic and rhetoric, arts fitter for graduates than children and novices.The Advancement of Learning (1605), Book II
Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670) was a Czech educator and religious leader, remembered mainly for his methods of teaching. He took up Bacon's attempt to organize all human knowledge, and he designed a school system in four stages: the mother's school, the school of the mother tongue, the Latin school, and the university. He taught from objects before words. His Orbis Pictus (1658), which means The Visible World in Pictures, became one of the most widely used school books of the century that followed.
Bacon wrote about how knowledge is found and how it should be taught. He did not write a K-12 plan, and the stage design is ours. Three of his ideas sit underneath it.
…the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter.The Advancement of Learning (1605), Book I
This is why Formational begins with things a child can see and touch.
…the understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.Novum Organum (1620), Book I, aphorism 104
This is why we climb in steps and do not leap to general claims.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.The Advancement of Learning (1605), Book I
Bacon also criticized teaching that is magistral and peremptory, delivered so that it is soonest believed and not easiest examined. That is why the older grades read primary texts and check them against scholars. Nullius in verba is the school's rule.
Forms how the student learns: looking closely, asking why, telling a fact from a guess.
Lays the base skills and habits of mind every pathway needs, with a taste of work, college, and venture.
Points the student toward a pathway and prepares them for it, through the Shakespeare units and their three plans.
Work, college, or venture. A graduate is an alumnus for life, and the spiral continues.
HomeworkHomework runs through every stage and grows with the student: a conversation at home in Formational, short practice and experiments in Foundational, and full reading in Directional.
SourcesFrancis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), Book I; Novum Organum (1620), Book I, aphorism 104; Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Harvard University Press, 1960). History of schooling: Encyclopedia of Educational Reform, “Age Grading” (SAGE); National Park Service, Quincy Grammar School; Encyclopedia.com, “Junior High School”; Education Next, “The Middle School Mess”; Will S. Monroe, Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform.
The four stages in full →An early sensory and story-based introduction to the Baconian world — content not yet built.
The entry point to the whole Academy — Observe, Inquisitive, Communities, Imagineering, Storytelling, and Build. Six modules teaching a child to look closely, ask why, and tell a fact from a guess, before any text-based analysis begins.
Enter Grade 1 →Nothing in nature is random — you just haven't found the pattern yet. Curriculum not yet built.
The right answer sometimes takes longer to arrive than the first guess. Curriculum not yet built.
Everyone's mind plays tricks. Knowing that is the beginning of thinking clearly. Curriculum not yet built.
You can't reason about a mess. Order comes first. Curriculum not yet built.
Bacon as father of the scientific method — a guess is worthless until it's tested. Curriculum not yet built.
Recognizing your own bias before it recognizes you. Curriculum not yet built.
Detecting manipulative language, and learning to write with the precision that resists it. Curriculum not yet built.
Fifteen weeks across three Epochs — the play read as a working model of statecraft: networks, monopoly, leverage, and mercy. Instructor's Companion, Student Workbook, Capstone Rubric, Glossary, Daily Lesson Plans, and Reading Packet all included. Placeholder grade placement — confirm before publishing.
Enter the Unit →Fifteen weeks across three Epochs — how a legitimate crown erodes through ceremony, and how a challenger builds a coalition without ever declaring it. Grounded in the real 1601 Essex Rebellion. Same full companion set as Semester 1. Placeholder grade placement — confirm before publishing.
Enter the Unit →Second Flagship play in the four-year arc. Curriculum not yet built.
Second Flagship play in the four-year arc. Curriculum not yet built.
Third Flagship play in the four-year arc. Curriculum not yet built.
Third Flagship play in the four-year arc. Curriculum not yet built.
Fourth and final Flagship play in the four-year arc. Curriculum not yet built.
Fourth and final Flagship play in the four-year arc. Curriculum not yet built.