The Good Shepherd Day School believes that education is the essential heart of our society and that the process of educating our children must be philosophically sound if our society is to continue to thrive. In the ever-changing technological society we live in today we believe that children must be able to adapt to change in whatever form they find it. Understanding change is our primary means of anticipating needs and enabling our children to thrive in this environment. We realize that education is the foundation of our future civilization.

   The Good Shepherd Day School believes that education is the preparation of individuals to respond to seen and unseen futures for the individual and common good, and to generally enhance the quality of human life. The focus of this philosophy is on the adaptability of the individual child.

   The Good Shepherd Day School believes in the importance of preparing children for an unknown future of ever-changing variables relevant to the individual. We do so from a present which is loaded with the sum of human histories, cultures, ideologies, religious beliefs and structures. The history of man has shown us that the gaining of "knowledge" is a cumulative process which transcends an individual's lifetime. We believe we are who we are, and will be who we will be in the future, explicitly because of the experiences we have had in the past. Our philosophy of education must therefore deeply instill in the individual a sense of identity within a cultural context, as well as within a given place and time. Children can better respond to the future if they can somehow learn to anticipate it.

   The Good Shepherd Day School philosophy of education also embraces the human distinctions of the mind, the body and the spirit. Our Western tradition has taught us to separate the three, as if each were independent of the others. However, we are as eternally thoughtful as we are spiritual, as spiritual as we are physical--all are one in composing the soul of a child.