Planner intends to start elementary school focusing on critical thinking.

Professionally speaking, there's not a lot a person can do with a philosophy degree. That thought wasn't lost on Michael Williams when he attended the University of Northern Colorado on a partial tennis scholarship in the early 1980s. He eventually chose a double major in philosophy and finance, appeasing both his pondering and practical sides.

Williams put his finance degree to good use as a certified financial planner, and today he's president of Altius Financial, a registered investment advisory firm in Denver.

As for his other undergraduate major, well, that came in handy for deep conversations. During one of those discussions a couple of years ago, he and a tennis buddy concluded that there was a dearth of individuals with whom to have intellectual talks because current education systems don't give people the knowledge base or structure to think well. "We both had an idea in the back of our minds that we'd like to start a school someday, and things got serious from there," says the 41-year-old Williams.

Williams, his wife and his friend are in the process of creating an elementary school called Aristotle Academy. Still a year or more away from opening its doors, the school's intended goal is to foster critical thinking skills that promote intellectually independent and self-reliant people. To accomplish this, they've patterned the school after two main concepts. The first is based on the ideas of Leonard Peikoff, a professor and lecturer who succeeded novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand as the foremost advocate of objectivism. At its core, objectivism is the philosophy of the individual, that a person's own happiness is the moral purpose of his or her life.

"One of the problems with Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it's easily distorted into being a hedonistic thing where you can do whatever you want," explains Williams. "Peikoff made it clear that it's about having the right to exist for yourself. That's not taught in public and private schools today, where the education philosophy is based on benefiting society or the parents and not the child. Our approach is that anything we teach a child, we have to show them there's a connection with their own life."

The curriculum's bedrock rests with something called the trivium concept, a classical education system based on history. Classroom time is spent integrating various topics from a historical perspective. For example, the first grade is driven by the ancient world, where students would be introduced to geography and the beginnings of arithmetic by learning about ancient Greek, Roman and other cultures relevant from that period. The second grade is based on the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance in third grade and modern times in fourth grade.

The process is repeated during grades five through eight, then repeated a third time in grades nine through 12. The three Rs and other basic learning would advance in complexity with each grade. But, explains Williams, infusing students with a repetitive exposure to historical periods presented in logical sequence integrates both old and new material in ways that enable the brain to make better connections.

"Students will get a liberal arts education and be more well-rounded, and that's the point of having a pre-college education," offers Williams. "College should be more about specialization. In many cases we defer a liberal arts education until college, and that's a waste of time, money and resources."

According to the business plan, Aristotle Academy would start small, with a single first-grade class of between 15 to 20 pupils. Then, hopefully, word-of-mouth advertising would help attract new students, and after a few years the school would hold classes for grades one though four. If the concept is successful, the partners envision their school eventually comprising grades one through 12. Another goal is for the school to be profitable.

But that's getting way ahead of things. For now, creating a school from scratch requires overcoming several logistical hurdles. To help get their school off the ground faster, Williams and his two partners researched the possibility of becoming a charter school. These are experimental schools that can get money from public school systems if their standards and methodologies meet the approval of state or local boards. But they rejected that route rather than compromise their educational mission.

"Our curriculum isn't politically correct," says Williams. "It's based on what we see is the objective truth about how the world developed. Our philosophy is based on the belief that western civilization is superior to a lot of other cultures, and we're not apologetic about that. That's one of the reasons we want to remain a private school."

Far from being dilettantes, Williams and his partners have studied the basic philosophical underpinnings of education. "Some say the purpose of school is to socialize a child and make them fit in with society. That's the prevalent attitude in public schools. Another purpose is to build character, instill morals and make them a better citizen. That's the parochial school model. Another purpose is to bring out the individual in the child. That's the Montessori model."

Those approaches have their place, says Williams, but his school's primary focus is on two other purposes. The first is creating a fundamental knowledge base that's been accumulated over the centuries. "You need a core knowledge base because you need to learn from all of the knowledge that's been passed down so you can learn from past mistakes in history," says Williams. "That's what civilization is all about."

The second main purpose is to encourage students to develop critical thinking skills. "Instead of being told what to think the rest of their lives, students will be able to think on their own, because they'll have a knowledge base of what's happened in the past and they'll be able to ask their own questions and have the foundation to make better decisions," he says. Testing will be important, although grades won't be the sole measure of a student's progress.

One of his prime motivating factors behind the school is to make sure his three daughters-ages seven and under-get a good education. But neither Williams nor the other partners plan to teach at the school. One partner, his wife Susan, whose undergraduate degree was in elementary education, works in business continuity and emergency planning. The other partner, Russ Shurts, is a corporate finance chief. Together, they're heavily involved in laying out and shaping the curriculum, and have hired people with extensive academic backgrounds and polished writing skills to draw up the lesson plans. They're also interviewing potential teachers who both understand their philosophy and fit within their budget.

Then there's the matter of finding a place to hold classes. If they don't get enough students at first to support renting a building, they'll go to a home-schooling model. As for marketing, the partners will place ads in educational publications and are holding discussion groups with potential parents, teachers and referrals in the Denver area.

Williams' endeavors leave him with different clientele at opposite ends of the age spectrum. There's the school, and there's his financial advisory firm that caters to people at or near retirement. Whether it's developing curriculum or focusing on wealth preservation, he believes that these two activities are closely integrated. "You have to educate people to be a good financial planner," he says.