2023-2024 Curriculum Guide - The Frederick Gunn School

Dear Future Highlander, On behalf of our faculty, welcome to The Frederick Gunn School! Whether you have already enrolled, or you are seeking to learn more about our comprehensive academic program, this Curriculum Guide is intended to serve as a useful resource to help you plan your academic journey as a student here.

How you map out your journey is, in many ways, up to you. WIth 125 courses, including 32 honors and AP classes as well as Independent Study Projects (ISPs), there are unique opportunities for you to explore what interests you here. Perhaps you will follow in the footsteps of many of our alumni, who tell us they discovered something new about themselves — a new skill, or passion — in their time here, which they then pursued in college, or used to guide them on their career path. At The Frederick Gunn School, we instill in our students a love of lifelong learning and the leadership skills they need to be active and responsible citizens, both locally and globally. We prepare our students for what’s next as they continue to learn and grow, in college and in life. And while your journey begins in the classroom, because we are a boarding school, it is expanded and amplified in our residential life and co-curricular programs. All of our community members, students and faculty alike, are committed to always be learning and growing, striving to become their best selves.

Frederick and Abigail Gunn knew instinctively what students needed to grow and develop. Their innovative approach to education emphasized challenging academics, character development, curiosity, risk-taking, problem-solving, and independent thinking. All of those things still resonate profoundly with how we teach students at our school today. As a school, we have distilled the elements of Mr. Gunn’s educational philosophy into a set of design standards we call our four Pillars.

Our Pillars give clear direction and a sense of purpose to our academic program, allowing us to uphold Mr. and Mrs. Gunn’s beliefs and strive to better ourselves in and out of the classroom. They understood, as we do, how students learn 24/7 in all aspects of their experience here — in athletics, the arts, the outdoors, our residential life program, and academics.

As a Gunn student, you will explore RISK-TAKING AND INNOVATION throughout our program and particularly in the new Thomas S. Perakos Arts and Community Center and the new Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Center for Innovation and Active Citizenship, opening in the Winter Term of 2024. Whether through the Arts, IDEAS Lab, our new Center for Entrepreneurship, or our Center for Citizenship and Just Democracy, students are pushed to innovate, to take risks, to try things outside of their comfort zones. Sometimes that means putting yourself out there. And if you fail, it means having the courage and the resilience to pick yourself up and try again.