The Heights Forum
The Heights Forum
Partners in Formation
The Heights Forum is the outreach branch of The Heights School. Our mission is to support educational leaders, teachers, and parents in their own efforts to educate the children entrusted to them.
Dangerously Good: Raising Magnanimous Sons
On April 13, The Heights welcomed eighty-five fathers to campus for its second annual Fatherhood Conference. Building on the success of last spring’s Fatherhood Conference, which focused on the power and importance of paternal presence, the theme for this year’s conference was the virtue of magnanimity. Featuring a blend of lectures and breakout discussions, this event also welcomed a long-time friend of the school, Fr. Carter Griffin, Rector of St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington. Following Mass and breakfast, Fr. Griffin opened the day with a lecture titled “Magnanimity...
Immersive Language Instruction: On the Polis Method
This episode explores the theory and the practice of the Polis Method of language instruction which relies on a variety of methods to offer students an immersive experience of second language acquisition. We are joined by Dr. Christophe Rico, Dean of the Polis Institute, and Mr. Guillermo Dillon, Latin teacher at the Northridge Preparatory School in Chicago, Illinois.
June 13-14, 2024
Mentoring Workshop
The Heights School • Potomac, MD
A conference for men in education interested in personalizing education
From Pickles to Peacock Brains: The Friendship of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
Tuesday, 24 May 1763: The rain had stopped before sunrise, but the sooty-film it left on the cobblestones off Inner-Temple-Lane made Boswell nearly slip into the mire twice. A third time, and the thought of sliding into horse-dung and God knows what else might have warned him off, ill-omened, to be sure. But Boswell wasn’t so easily put off today, so he watched his footing, while the sounds of carriages and whipped horses and carts and jouncing coaches filled his ears with something like a medley, a humming tune of...
Intellectual Virtue and Personal Sovereignty
In an essay titled “Elementary Studies” in the book The Idea of a University, St. John Henry Newman narrates a fictional account of a weak student, identified by the generic name of Mr. Brown, who flounders on an oral entrance examination. Newman mentions that the underlying reason for his “inaccuracy of mind” was a “mental restlessness and curiosity.” The boy had read many books, books by authors such as Virgil, Cicero, and Xenophon that are considered classic works. But he read them in a disordered way, thinking “that the gratification...