Bard College at Simon's Rock, more commonly known as Simon's Rock and previously as Simon's Rock College of Bard (see below), is a residential four-year liberal arts college located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The foremost of the many unusual things about Simon's Rock is that it is an "early college", designed for students to enroll immediately after completing the tenth or eleventh grade, rather than after graduating from high school. St...
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Bard College at Simon's Rock, more commonly known as Simon's Rock and previously as Simon's Rock College of Bard (see below), is a residential four-year liberal arts college located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The foremost of the many unusual things about Simon's Rock is that it is an "early college", designed for students to enroll immediately after completing the tenth or eleventh grade, rather than after graduating from high school. Students who attend Simon's Rock rarely earn a high school diploma, and matriculate, on average, at the age of 16.
The college's founder, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, had formerly been a private girls' school headmistress at Concord Academy. She concluded from her experience, and that of her colleagues, that for many students the latter two years of high school are wasted on repetitious and overly constrained work. Many young students, she thought, are ready to pursue college-level academic work some time before the usual system asks it of them....
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