Background: A Dream Looking for Reality

Sometime in mid-April 2009, a group of young professionals, parents, and education experts came together and dreamt of creating an opportunity for children and early adolescents to acquire basic education that would eventually pave the way for sound leadership and service in private business, social enterprise, the academe, government, and the rest of civil society. The school was to be an academic community committed to offer the kind of education good and responsible parents would want for their children.

It was to be a non-denominational, lay and secular, school for boys and girls, offering basic education that spans from pre-school to high school. The orientation was to be liberal education, where teachers “teach students rather than subjects”, where their fields of specialization become “a life to be lived rather than just subjects to be taught”, where they see their subjects they teach as simply aspects of the one and the same reality they help the students understand.

Not long after, plans were finalized for a basic education school that would start with high school and proceed with grade school, with curriculum levels progressively added through the years. This is motivated by the desire to encourage older students to be helpful buddies with their younger counterparts.

Not long after, architectural plans, academic programs, the Department of Education blessings, legal issues, a home in Circulo Verde (school groundbreaking took place on 8 September 2009), incorporation papers (dated 9 September 2009), start of construction, and most important, the school leadership and expertise, fell into the right place at the right time.

And Bannister Academy was born, under the aegis of Bannister Academy Corporation. And the launching of the initial curriculum levels was to take place in June 2010, with First and Second Year high school pioneering the teaching and learning adventure, the dream searching for reality.