Golden Thread Academic is a new educational imprint dedicated to restoring rigorous academic standards worthy of—and essential to—our national and civilizational traditions. By engaging the finest minds in education to develop powerful textbooks and curricular resources across history, language arts, mathematics, science, and beyond, Golden Thread Academic brings students into living contact with the great ideas that have forged the civilization that we inhabit and cherish.
The Mission
Honoring the great traditions of the West and of America.
Reinstating lost standards for excellence is an arduous task. Fortunately, a path towards academic renewal has been charted by a burgeoning reform movement of parents and educators who aspire to a higher standard for children. In recent years this coalition has made critical strides in expanding families’ freedom to choose alternatives from legacy educational models.
This inspiring movement has the potential to fundamentally reorient American education. However, for these new, aspirational K-12 institutions are to thrive, expand, and supplant the entrenched system, they must be supported by the highest-quality educational resources.
Just as entrenched education models are reinforced by a multi-billion-dollar industry of educational products, reform models must be equipped with abundant resources that meet the ambitious goals of students and educators alike.
Golden Thread Academic offers textbooks and curricular resources that uphold the highest ideals of student formation. Whether in classical, charter, parochial, homeschool, private or public school settings, Golden Thread Academic is dedicated to meeting the needs of any institution seeking to restore a higher standard of education.
Every generation needs to re-examine the past, both to admire anew its accomplishments and culture, and to gain wisdom from its challenges and setbacks.
The TextBooks
The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by eminent historians Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins, will offer an eloquent and refreshing overview of the trajectory of the West—its unique customs of art and literature, law, philosophy, science, faith, and tolerance that have bound the people of its tradition together—from the ancient Greeks and Romans to medieval Christendom and Europe, and finally the modern world and America.
Professor Wilfred M. McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story is a groundbreaking approach to telling our national story to the modern audience of young Americans. Encompassing the broad arc of American history, the ultimate takeaway from this text is that America, despite occasional deviations from her founding ideals, is the crowning achievement of the Western project, and the last remaining hope for its future.
THE ACTION PLAn
Golden Thread Academic is:
- Partnering with district, independent, charter, and religious schools to provide textbooks and comprehensive curricular scaffolding for a wide variety of classroom settings.
- Working with networks of educators, advocates, and public servants to develop state and local adoption campaigns tailored to the needs of local school districts.
- Inaugurating pilot programs with wide distribution of free curricular materials.
- Pricing books competitively such that they are affordable and widely available to students and parents from all backgrounds.
support
“A civilization is a space, so to speak, in which people may breathe. It creates a public forum, a city square, in which they may do something other than tremble and labor for simple survival. It allows people to erect monuments of art, literature, and thought alongside the every-day necessity to work, to produce, to exchange. It is a necessity, because the human spirit cannot be captured simply by the way we earn bread or avoid massacre; there is a natural yearning after order, after beauty, after truth. Civilization celebrates that yearning, encourages it, and provides the means by which it may flourish, and the means by which it can be protected from harm.”
“As a people who aspire to civility—to the goodness, truth, and beauty that our tradition, like a river, bears down us from the civilizations of the past—we, too, have a duty to study and cherish what we have been given by our ancestors, and to preserve it for our children.”
James Hankins & Allen C. Guelzo
get involved
We are building a network of allies in America’s educational communities.
Golden Thread Academic is hosting a wide variety of public events, conferences, and summits that will underscore the task of academic renewal.
If you are an educator, advocate, parent, or anyone else who would like to join and support us, please contact us at [email protected].
