The ISF Academy Shuyuan

A world of complexity awaits school graduates today. They face overwhelming challenges: fierce global competition, unprecedented interconnectedness and interdependence, developing and emergent technologies, climate change, environmental degradation, and the looming crisis of unsustainable demands for energy. New ways of thinking are needed to develop the knowledge and technologies to solve these problems, at a philosophical level, as well as at a scientific and technological level. Only those ideas that transcend scientific innovation and technological design to embrace their philosophical, ethical and moral dimensions will truly meet the needs of an emerging new world.

The purpose of The ISF Academy Shuyuan is to give students from Grade 6 to 9 a deep foundation in comparative classical civilizations, merging Chinese civilization, which spans over 5,000 years, and Western civilization, which originated with Greco-Roman culture 3,000 years ago. The wisdom and values of these great, ancient civilizations are timeless; they are an indispensable part of a complete education. In the ISF Academy Shuyuan, our students build a unique cultural literacy through their exploration of these two great civilizations. There is no such program offered by any other secondary school in the world.  Shuyuan is an elective program and students may choose not to participate in it.  

Chinese civilization has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn.

Joseph Needham, Scientist, Historian and Sinologist

The ISF Academy’s guiding ethos, the Eight Virtues + One, inform student inquiry as they confront the major issues of life, which the ancients addressed so admirably, namely morality, courage, commitment, purpose, loyalty, sacrifice, goodness. The great classical works of literature, poetry, drama, rhetoric, history, mythology, philosophy, art, architecture, politics and ethics offer the portal through which students will ponder and debate these seminal issues. 

While the contemporary meaning of the characters 書院 (shuyuan), which form the ‘Academy’ part of the name of our school, is limited to the generic notion of ‘college’ or ‘academy’, the traditional concept of shuyuan, is quite different. Originating in the Tang Dynasty, the traditional shuyuan was a private sanctuary of intellectual and academic freedom that had three essential purposes: a place to collect important literary works; a place for study under tutors; and a place in which to conduct in-depth research into the classics of literature, history, and philosophy. Historians credit much of the advances in the study of Chinese literature, history, and philosophy through the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties to the emergence of the shuyuan. 

Emerging from reflection on how our students might benefit from learning about contrasts and similarities between Eastern and Western thinking, and drawing on the millennium-long history of the Shuyuan ideal, the concept of our Shuyuan embodies the spirit of The ISF Academy.