To open this year, the legendary Illinois educator John Hallwas wrote a piece for The Community Word entitled “Liberal Arts and studies in humanities under attack on college campuses” (Jan., 2024). He thoroughly offered research on the decline of broad, cross-discipline liberal arts education in America in favor of a job-training model, specifically in schools of higher education. He noted that our nation now sees a liberal arts education as “an expensive extravagance or a waste of time, a diversion from the real world of jobs, money, status, and power.” We concur with his concern but offer hope for our future as well.

We at Peoria Academy still believe, thoroughly, that “education should cultivate the individual for contributing to our democratic culture.” Our philosophy at Peoria Academy is to instill the rigor, critical thinking, and humanity of a liberal arts education into our elementary and middle school students so that they will be fully prepared, empathetic, curious, and nimble citizens when they graduate from our programs. We are a diverse community of students, parents, and educators working together to provide a rigorous educational experience right here in central Illinois. We use progressive techniques that nurture the whole child, and our independent school fosters intrinsic motivation, resilience, and creativity across our programming.

Further, Peoria Academy is proud to have been recently certified as an International Baccalaureate (IB) school. IB programs emphasize a holistic approach to teaching and learning, transdisciplinary thought, student-driven inquiry, authentic real-world experiences, and international-mindedness in a context that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of backgrounds and cultures that make up our school community. Further, as a private, independent school, Peoria Academy is free to curate materials and approaches in every grade level and subject area to give our students the very best learning opportunities and a lifelong love of inquiry and discovery. We cultivate curiosity and interpersonal connections every day. And, by linking disciplines, solving problems, and exercising creativity, we are daily building the cornerstone capabilities of our collective future. Peoria Academy students will be especially well prepared to contribute as thoughtful citizens of our national democracy and global world, just as Mr. Hallwas advocates.

We write this concurrence with Mr. Hallwas to provide hope and assurance to our central Illinois community that it has an institution, right at its heart, which still believes in the power of curiosity and mutual understanding and is dedicated to instilling the value of a broad-based liberal arts education in our youngest generations. In this increasingly polarized time, we have doubled down on the core promise that our founders had nearly 25 years ago: To build an excellent, diverse, and international school serving the greater Peoria community. We work, daily, to draw our students together in mutual understanding, as Mr. Hallwas so eloquently appealed for.

So, we invite you to join us in our mission, to act locally to bolster and safeguard a nuanced, personalized, broad-based, and humane liberal arts education for our young students, right here in Peoria. Please visit our website (peoriaacademy.org), email our administration with your questions, consider a generous donation to support our students and further our mission, or join us for an admissions tour; we’d love to meet you and your family.

We see the spark of curiosity and optimism every day in our students, and we welcome your help to continue our necessary work, to protect that spark, to continue being “a model and inspiration for cultural understanding and social progress” in our home and yours, central Illinois.

In service,
Principal Marissa Draney
Director Chris Wilson
Director Brandon Jordan