OUR PHILOSOPHY
MISSION
We recognize and celebrate a child’s truest self. We provide a nurturing community that reveres their capacity to think, care, and act with integrity and confidence.
VISION
At The Garden School, through immersion in the natural world, we cultivate the child’s will to strive, discover and learn.
Our approach is …
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Unhurried
Hurrying a child through their academic journey is known to cost them self-confidence, often presenting them with a premature burden or anxiety. We introduce developmentally appropriate academic concepts so children may be joyful, enthusiastic learners for life.
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Experiential
We preserve the innocence and wonder of childhood through security and freedom; allowing children to move, learn, create, and play within a safe and predictable environment and rhythm. Academics come to life for our students through lived experiences and connection to nature.
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Holistic
We believe that the education of students, teachers, and parents is a lifelong process. Students engage with a broad curriculum that celebrates the diversity of humankind.
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Inspired
Creativity and artistic expression are essential to a child’s healthy growth and development, and are fully integrated into our curriculum. Self-expression through art and handwork enhance deep learning and retention of academic material.
The Garden School’s educational philosophy provides a broad, balanced, and holistic education that nurtures the whole human being. We strive to develop individuals who are able, in and of themselves, to impart meaning to their lives.
Media-Conscious
Parenting
OUR WHY
Our efforts to foster students’ healthy emotional development and meaningful relationships with their environment are undermined by encounters with media which separate children from authentic experience and promote developmentally inappropriate, and consumerist views of the world. By delaying and reducing a child’s exposure to electronic media we hope to encourage a measured, inquiry-based relationship to technology.
OUR CULTURE
While we know that most families have some media as part of the home experience, we encourage families to significantly limit or discontinue exposure to television, movies, video games, computers and other entertainment media. At the very minimum, we expect families to maintain a no-media policy during the school week. As students get older, media is introduced and included in the school curriculum as an adjunct to the learning process through the program Cyber Civics, designed to teach online stewardship in the middle grades.
The school and the families in our community support new families making this transition. New students have an easier time acclimating to this policy when they experience it as the status quo expectation of our community.
We "receive the child in reverence, educate them with love, and lead them to the true freedom" that belongs to an enlightened human being.
- Rudolf Steiner