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St. Louis students honor the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

It seems like a lot of text for the youngest of the students—who are just 4 years old—but like the meaning, just like the students, evolves.

Four score and seven years ago—and then another 155 years: November 19 is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of the famous Gettysburg Address. Today, students at one school in St. Charles look to the past to create lasting lessons in the classroom.

“The Gettysburg address is one of those pieces of history that is an anchor for our country,” said Katy McKinney, head of school at Classical Academy de Lafayette in O’Fallon, Missouri.

It seems like a lot of text for the youngest of the students—who are just 4 years old—but McKinney says the meaning, just like the students, evolves.

“What’s fun is as they know and understand the words, they better understand what it means to be an American.

That focus on primary documents, arts, history, and the classics is fundamental at the pre-K through 8th grade school, which McKinney started two years ago.

“Unfortunately so many of our schools these days are not teaching content, and content is essential to being a great thinker,” she said. “So, Abraham Lincoln was a voracious reader when he was a child.

We want to know that history, what made him the man and the leader that he was, he wasn’t perfect but he did great things in turbulent times,” she said. “And we study that so when we come across hard challenges, we can make better decisions and it can hopefully benefit not just ourselves but the whole.”

But that does give the students some pretty impressive memorization skills along the way.

While you’ll see plenty of dictionaries and books of classic literature at the Academy, one thing you won’t see is a laptop in front of every student.

“There’s nothing wrong with technology, we tell our students it’s a tool, it’s not a toy, necessarily—at least not from an academic standpoint,” said McKinney. “But I think what is important is before we use technology, we have to be great thinkers.”

And at a young age, McKinney believes we could all learn a little something from these kids already.

“I feel so privileged to be able to work with these kids that are cheering themselves and their friends and they express fortitude or courage in the face of a hard test, or temperance self-control when they want to grab that ball away from someone else and they say no,” she said. “These are huge lessons, and they’re doing it at 5, 6, 7 years old.”

“And if they can do it,” she added, “there’s hope that our whole country can do it.”

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