Secular high school Curriculum Online

You want secular high school classes that are working to decolonize the curriculum, introduce students to big thinking academics, AND are still fun to talk about at the dinner table?

We’ve got you.

We do the heavy lifting so you can do the fun stuff.

For secular homeschoolers who want a fun, decolonized, rigorous way to homeschool high school and middle school, home/school/life’s Deep Thought is the progressive high school curriculum that does the academic heavy lifting so that you can enjoy the fun stuff. Unlike other high school curriculum, home/school/life’s Deep Thought curriculum teaches students how to learn, not just what to learn and makes big academics surprisingly fun for the whole family.

Imagine a homeschool experience that …

  • Prepares teens for college academics AND executive function work

  • Inspires excitement, curiosity, and conversation

  • Gives you a toolkit that translates super-easily into high school transcripts

  • Builds critical thinking and conversation skills

  • Brings the best parts of traditional school and the best parts of homeschooling together in a four-year learning plan

  • Reminds you why you were so excited about doing this whole homeschooling high school thing in the first place

(And it’s totally secular. Just in case you were worried.)

Homeschooling high school is our happy place. It can be your happy place, too.

Write your life after high school success story.

WHAT FAMILIES SAY ABOUT THEIR ACADEMY EXPERIENCE:

“These classes changed my daughter’s whole attitude toward school. I cannot ever thank you enough.”

“I enjoy being at the Academy because I feel like I’m gaining greater insight into history and literature here than I would anywhere else.”

“This school was literally life-changing for my teen.”

“The Academy made me realize that I’m actually a great student.”

“I felt so prepared for college because I already knew how to manage my own time and projects when I started.”

“The Academy is the magical unicorn we were looking for.”

Love your kid AND YOUR CURRICULUM

You don’t have to do it all yourself…

  • Learn right along with your teen; these classes are designed to inspire big conversations for the whole family.

  • Feel confident about how you’re assigning high school grades and credits.

  • Build a collection of student work that shows academic progress, mastery, and creativity.

  • Have more time for all your favorite parts of homeschooling. These last years of homeschool should be as fun and magical as the early years.

  • Get one-on-one support from Suzanne and Amy. We run a hybrid homeschool program that sends high school grads off to college every year, so we can help you navigate the process for your student without having to reinvent the wheel.

relaxed teen homeschooler working on laptop while sitting in bed eating breakfast

 Does this sound familiar?

You’re tempted by the possibility of homeschooling high school, but …

It’s so hard to find secular high school curriculum and classes, and you don’t want to make everything up from scratch all by yourself.

You’re worried that your inexperience homeschooling high school will end up costing your kid opportunities, scholarships, and other post-high school options.

It’s been a long time since you applied to college, and all the transcripts and credit hours and class descriptions seem so complicated to figure out.

Your high school to-do checklist is so long and involved that there’s no room left for fun — and you’re still not sure you’re doing enough.

Our online homeschool classes cover the academic bases, prepare kids for college, and make figuring out grades and transcripts practically painless. (Plus they’re fun!)

School should be part of your life, not your whole life.

With our online classes:

  • You set your own schedule. If you follow our recommended plan, you’ll end up with almost as much time off as class time.

  • You focus on growth, not grades.

  • Your student has space to make mistakes and try things they don’t already know they’re good at.

  • The focus is on learning, not test scores.

  • Students get experience managing schedules and projects — without big, bad, real-life consequences.

  • Your family can learn together.

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You don’t have to be an expert in everything to homeschool high school.

You just need to be creative, curious, and humble enough to learn with your student. Too often, homeschool parents put the focus on ourselves: How are we qualified? Do we know enough? Are we capable? But if we focus on our students, the questions look a lot different — and the path is a lot clearer. What does my kid need? How can we make that happen? How can I support them?

Think of home/school/life academy as the academic equivalent of a Lego kit. We give you all the pieces. If you want, you can use them to make the same structure we did, but you can also put your own spin on parts of the project or even just use the blocks to make something completely different. If you want structure, our weekly email to-do lists break down your learning plan day-by-day. If you want the freedom to dip into subjects that interest you at your own pace and in your own way, you can do that, too.

what do you want high school to feel like?

For parents, these high school years are all about building relationships and memories that will carry your family into its next stage, with adult kids off on their own adventures. Don’t waste this precious time worrying about GPAs.

Wouldn’t it be great to know ...

  • Your teen is going to be well-prepared for college academic and executive function work, whatever they decide to do after high school.

  • You’ll know you’re choosing an education that values diversity, creativity, and curiosity over checking boxes.

  • Every single class you take will include original lectures, a variety of assignments and activities, thoughtful summative activities, and nuanced strategies for evaluating your student’s success with them.

  • You have the support of experts who’ve spent the past 12 years helping homeschool grads navigate their way to the next stage of their learning lives.

  • Your classes are secular, progressive, and authored and vetted by experts in the field.

  • Your student is learning how to think critically, make connections, and develop their own definition of success.

  • There’s not a multiple choice test anywhere.

  • You can do all the fun stuff and not have to worry about whether your bases are being covered — they are!

Homeschool high school
with confidence.

Imagine your student texting you from a college seminar, “I think I’m the only person in this class who has already read Kant” or “I aced my first essay in history!” I get texts like that from students all the time. They’re not just prepared for college — they’re excited to be there.

That’s what I want for your student, too.

 home/school/life Academy

Progressive, Secular Homeschool Classes

Build a secular high school curriculum that you’ll love as much as your student does.

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 What’s included in the full curriculum

A student in striped tights works on their laptop with headphones and coffee beside them.

Every class you want to take

Your subscription includes everything but math and a foreign language: When you wrap up the year, you’ll have completed five credits — one each in U.S. history, U.S. literature, philosophy, chemistry, and U.S. government.

A laptop is open on a cozy blanket with a mug of coffee and journal.

Scheduling & grading support

Keep on schedule with weekly to-do list emails — plus tips for managing your schedule, fun weekly warm-up ideas, and extension activities that can inspire further learning. Even better, you’ll get step-by-step support to help your student set learning goals, check in with them over the year, and evaluate their progress multiple times during the year.

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Monthly check-in calls

All enrolled students and parents can join Amy’s monthly Zoom Q&A, where we’ll answer questions about assignments, projects, transcripts, college applications, extracurriculars — whatever’s on your mind.

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95% of materials and readings

I hate it when classes end up costing as much for books as for the class, so we include almost everything you’ll need in your weekly lessons — download the readings onto your tablet or print them out, and you’re all set. You’ll only need to provide supplies for the chemistry experiments you want to do and three books: The Disappearing Spoon, The Awakening, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. That’s it.

Students have called our classes “weird in the best way”

  • The Queer, Colorful, Feminist, Immigrant History of the United States

    Let's decolonize U.S. history together! I couldn’t find U.S. history curriculum that told the stories I wanted my kids to hear — stories that weren’t the whitewashed stories of American mythology but the stories of people (men, women, and nonbinary) who made space for themselves on the margins of history. Some of their stories are happy, some are sad, most are both, but these are the people I wanted my high schooler to get to know during our U.S. history studies. Since that curriculum didn’t exist, I made it.

  • Taboo Breakers and Innovators in U.S. Literature

    Let's break all the rules with U.S. literature outsiders. The poet Diane Wakoski says, "“American poetry is always about defining oneself individually, claiming one’s right to be different and often to break taboos... America may be a melting pot, but most American poets think of themselves as separate, different, and while very specially identified with some place in America or some set of cultural traditions, it is usually about the ways in which they discovered their differences from others and proudly celebrate them.” We’ll be consider authors and literary movements that wrote new rules for literature.

  • Transcendentalism

    Let's get philosophical with Transcendentalism. If the United States has its own philosophical tradition, it’s Transcendentalism, a wide-reaching school of thought that spread across U.S. intellectual circles in the 19th century. It borrowed some ideas from Asian philosophies and definitely reacted to some of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but it carved out a niche as a philosophy that both encouraged and emphasized individualism AND insisted on the importance of community and connection. Antiracist, antisexist, and antiabsolutist, Transcendentalism is a fascinating school of thought to explore.

  • Chemistry for People Who Would Rather Be Reading

    Let's explore the big ideas and cultural significance of chemistry. Chemistry and the United States have a lot in common: The U.S. Constitution was written the same year Antoine de Lavoisier submitted the chemical naming convention that would become the basis of modern chemistry. So in many ways, the United States and the science of chemistry have grown up together — they’re both recent additions to their respective worlds, and they’re both children of Enlightenment rationalism, impressed with their own specialness in a way that can sometimes make them oblivious to their potential faults. Chemistry and the United States have both participated in imperialism, both prioritized capitalism and economic progress over human life, and both changed the social, political, and natural landscape of the world.

Yes, I'm ready to join!

Plus get all the support you need to succeed:

weekly high school checklist on an ipad

Weekly checklists

Get an action plan for every single week, including our recommendations for how to break down big projects and assignments over multiple days or weeks. You don’t have to be the bad guy about what needs to get done — the checklist spells it out.

an iphone with high school homeschool activities sits on a book on top of a desk with eyeglasses and a plant

Email extras

Every week, in addition to your weekly checklist, I’ll send over tips for the week ahead — plus fun ideas for academic warmup and extension activities based on the week’s to-do list.

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Success trackers

Student contracts, self-evaluations, and regular self-check-ins keep students focused on goals and growth — not just grades. Your student will always know exactly how they’re doing, even without graded assignments.

So how much is it, exactly?

Choose your learning path

Try a class or two!

Just the Class

from $20/week

Does your high school homeschool plan need a little extra oomph? You can snap up an individual class or two to complement your carefully planned curriculum. (Parents say this is the most fun if you’re sitting in on classes together.)

Enjoy the whole shebang!

Full Curriculum

$300/month
(Continue classes free after 10 months)

This is the package people have been asking for for years: Get the full Academy experience, including literature, history, science, philosophy, and government, complete with lectures, projects, readings, activities, and more.

Who is Deep Thought For?

Of course, no school is the right fit for every student — the kids who do best with us are the ones who want to shake up the traditional curriculum and think harder and deeper about big ideas. We always say that we want to teach our students how to think, not what to think, and that's really true.

The people behind the classes

I’m Amy Sharony, and I’m a homeschool nerd.

Homeschooling is my favorite thing because learning is my favorite things, and homeschooling has given me opportunities to keep learning in ways I never imagined. Deep Thought was born from my own dissatisfaction with secular high school history curriculum options — when I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I went back to college for a doctorate in history and wrote our U.S. history curriculum while I was working on my dissertation. (I totally get the massive privilege that made this an option for me.) That was just the beginning, and now Deep Thought is the official high school curriculum of the Academy hybrid school and a full four-year high school program that people hop on lists to wait for. I’m proud of what we’ve done, but I’m also always going to keep adding and changing things because (I hope) I’m always going to keep learning and growing as a human and a student.

It makes me so happy when students and parents tell me how much they love our classes — and especially when they tell me about the great conversations these classes inspire.

How do I grade my student’s work and other FAQs

  • Deep Thought is designed to encourage kids to ask questions and deepen their understanding. So it’s not about right answers.

    My recommendation is always to give kids the most points for showing up and engaging with the work. So a student who does their homework every week and makes a sincere effort on projects and papers is an A student for me. (I know the stories about students who show up and ace the test to pass the class, but that’s not really what meaningful learning looks like to me.)

    Every class comes with a self-reflection activity at the end to help students parse out their own evaluation of their work. I honestly think if they engage with these activities in a genuine way, you will find this to be a great indicator of the kind of grade they’ve earned for a class.

    If you want a plan for assigning points to the work your student is doing, the full curriculum plan comes with grade matrixes for every subject. (But, honestly, you don’t need them!)

  • It’s not!

    You can’t actually have an accredited curriculum — only schools can be accredited. (And not all schools — including public high schools! — are accredited.) When schools get accredited, they pay an organization to put the accredited stamp on their school. That’s all it means.

    A lot of people want accredited programs for high school because they think they will make getting into college easier. For the most part, that’s not true. Most of the homeschoolers I’ve known over the past decade have gotten into college with their plain old unaccredited high school transcript, no problem. Other people want an accredited program because they think it will make it easier if their kid wants to transition back to traditional high school. Disappointingly, this isn’t the case — you would think accredited high school credits would transfer to public high schools, but they are often treated just like regular homeschool credits.

    If accreditation is important to you (and it’s OK if it is!), you’re really looking for an online school, not online classes.

  • All our classes are divided into lessons, and we expect each lesson to take one to two weeks. If you get excited and really want to dig into something for a longer time, that’s pretty normal. If you’re skimming through lessons at a faster rate than one a week, you’re kind of missing the point of the curriculum, which is to slow down and think more.

  • Absolutely! Our students are prepared both academically and executive functionally for higher education because they have experience with the schedule, workload, and type of assignments they’ll be doing in college.

  • Your subscription renews every month, so you can stop your subscription any time. You’re not stuck for the whole year if it’s not working for you.

  • You don’t. Students are individual people who come to their studies with all kinds of experiences, interests, and abilities — you probably know way better than I could what kind of learning works for you student.

    Over the years, we’ve figured out that the students who are most successful with our program are the ones who really want to be part of it. They test-drive a day of classes, and if they leave wanting more, they are pretty much guaranteed to be a good fit. So try that: We’ve got a free week of the full Deep Thought curriculum you can test drive, and if your student is excited and engaged, that’s a good sign you’ve found a good fit. (You can use this trick with other curriculum, too.)

Come learn with us!

Our Secular High School Classes

Homeschool high school like it’s fun — because it really is!

home/school/life academy

In the metro Atlanta area?
You can check out our Atlanta secular high school classes for homeschoolers at the Academy.