Education
The school's primary concern is to provide pupils with not just academic, sporting and other achievements, but also "a spiritual compass for life": moral principles to give guidance in a secular world; within a context where the "Benedictine ethos permeates pupils’ experience".
The Good Schools Guide called the school an "Unfailingly civilised and understanding top co-educational boarding Catholic school that has suffered from time to time as a result of its long liberal tradition." The Guide adds also that there is "A refreshing openness and honesty about the place these days."
It is notable that its academic admissions policy is not as exacting as that exercised by some other English public schools. As a result, the school is typically between 150 - 200 in the annual league tables of public examination results, although it was ranked 6th nationally in the 2004 "value added" table.
It maintains a scholarship set, with about 5% of pupils gaining the offer of a place at Oxford or Cambridge. Over 90% go on to university.
Read more about this topic: Ampleforth College
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“There must be a profound recognition that parents are the first teachers and that education begins before formal schooling and is deeply rooted in the values, traditions, and norms of family and culture.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)