Near North Montessori: Upper School
Preparation for Adult Life: Seeing Education As An “Aid to Life”
“Everything that concerns education assumes today an importance of a general kind, and must represent a protection and a practical aid to the development of man; that is to say, it must aim at improving the individual in order to improve society.”
-Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence
Maria Montessori believed that adolescent education provided two main challenges to educators: to protect students through the difficult physical transition to adulthood, and to prepare them to fully engage and improve their society in their new role as grown men and women. As a Montessori adolescent program, it is our challenge to translate this imperative into the classroom. A Near North classroom goes beyond the narrower mission of a traditional school, in which knowledge is handed down from teacher to student. Instead, students are inspired to find and create new sources of information, to identify and then solve problems as subtle and complex as those they will face as leading, 21st Century adults. What Maria Montessori wrote in 1948, that adaptability is “the most essential quality” for students and institutions alike, is as true now as it is has ever been.
Teachers at Near North act in two main capacities. First, our teachers are instructors, who ensure our students are academically prepared for the high schools they will attend upon graduation and who inspire them with their own mastery of the studied subjects. Second, and just as importantly, our teachers acts as guides, channeling the students’ own drive and curiosity, providing needed resources, offering counsel, and lending structure and discipline as students take on the exciting tasks of learning and discovery on their own.
As such, Near North’s course of study covers the broad spectrum of subjects necessary for success and cultural understanding in today’s world, including science, mathematics, language arts, social studies, and physical education. However, students are also empowered to go far beyond a traditional education. In Near North’s adolescent program, we foster our students’ innate interests and talents with opportunities to experience the outdoors on weeklong trips out of the city, to run businesses and act on creative initiatives, to explore the city of Chicago, and to assimilate a true appreciation of the world’s interconnectedness by helping tend to garden-plots on an urban farm just a few blocks east of our building on Division Street.
More than anything, Near North’s adolescent program is designed to fulfill the mission that Maria Montessori set forth over a half-century ago: to act as an “aid to life.” Students leave Near North not only as students able to complete academic tasks and solve practical problems, but as young adults prepared for the myriad challenges that life will throw their way.