Our Story

It is a rare experience to draft a letter on behalf of someone other than yourself, rarer still when that “someone” is as abstract and incorporeal as a company. The task affords us a moment to consider what a company is or, more specifically, what our company is, what it has been, and what it strives to become.

The Study Co. is a company legally conceived in 2014. Not so old as to be considered a titan of industry. Not so young as to be considered a fledgling with untested ambitions. We have existed long enough to have accumulated traditions, failures, a wall full of Polaroids, battle-tested printers, and a guardian goose to watch over our beanbag.

The Study Co. is a company of educators—currently sixteen, give or take a few at any given time, drawn from all walks of life. A motley crew of teachers, former students, engineers, artists, craft lovers, Dostoevsky fans, unit-circle admirers, and generally smart folk. But smarts alone does not make a teacher. It takes patience, experience, and a great deal of heart.

The Study Co. is a company that serves students. Yes, our website will profess that we serve parents and schools as well, and that is true. But ultimately, it is the students whom we serve. They are the primary cause; parents and schools are, in some sense, auxiliary beneficiaries of that work.

And the business of serving students can be made as easy or as difficult as one chooses to make it. It is easy enough to deliver a lesson, assign a worksheet, record a grade, and call the work complete.

If only it were that easy.

Students are complicated. Equally distractable, burned out, disenchanted, ambitious, hungry, and eager. Eager for something they cannot quite put their finger on, though they know it is there, and we do too. And it is our job to help give that shapeless thing shape, weight, and direction - keep it alive and thumping. That’s no easy task. After all, things of value seldom come without a proper challenge.

The word company carries the Latin roots for “together” (com-) and “bread” (pan). A company was, in the oldest sense, people with whom bread was shared.

I close my eyes and imagine a group of messmates gathered around a candlelit table, a hulking loaf of bread before them, soon to be torn apart and passed from hand to hand. Crumbs lie scattered without concern. There is conversation. There is laughter. Something as humble as bread has brought them together.

Is education our bread? Is it the students? Perhaps it is something more ethereal still.

We are a company that believes there is enough bread to be shared in our humble 2,000-square-foot corner of the world—a corner made a little larger by the internet, and larger and richer still by you.

So, on behalf of our company, welcome to The Study Co.