Near North Montessori: Upper School

Guiding Principles

Sustainability
In all subject areas, students are challenged to think in balanced, ecologically sound terms. As the school strives to meet current needs without compromising those of future generations, students are led to consider, evaluate and take part in these choices and challenges. Just as Maria Montessori advocated a “cosmic education” that emphasized the vast interrelatedness of the universe, our teachers provide students opportunities to observe the life cycles and complex social webs on which all life depends.

Ethics
Developmentally, adolescents are at a prime age for moral excitement and outrage, but also for great lapses in their own behavior toward others. Accordingly, the adolescent program places a curriculum-wide emphasis on ethics, the application of a moral code to real-life situations. Whether in discussions of newspaper articles pertaining to current events, in essay topics following a group reading assignment, or in the study of history and social organization, students are encouraged to view subject matter through a moral lens and to consider their own agency to improve the conditions of others.

Pedagogy of Place
In To Educate the Human Potential, Maria Montessori wrote that “the fundamental principal in education is correlation of all subjects, and their centralization in the cosmic plan.” This centralization becomes even more important at the adolescent level: as students begin to think more abstractly, an allegiance to their own human surroundings and natural environment provides the context to explore and gain understanding of larger issues. Day trips into the city and a year-long working relationship to garden-plots on Division Street’s City Farm help focus our students on their immediate surroundings. However, it is a curriculum-wide emphasis on Near North’s neighborhood community—a focus that permeates everything from algebra word problems to social studies lectures—that drives home the importance of place and community. 

Valorization of Work
Maria Montessori strongly believed that students’ work held meaning only if it became valuable to the students themselves. True learning, she argued, occurred when adolescents took on the challenge of discovery proactively, a process she called “valorization.” Near North’s curriculum aims to facilitate valorization at all levels, but elements of the adolescent program are specifically designed to draw it out. For instance, our adolescents are challenged to work in small, student-run businesses called “micro-economies,” where financial realities and the expectations of those they interact with make the consequences of their work undeniably “real.” Where other schools place a greater emphasis on the accumulation of specific facts or on graded work, Near North’s adolescent instructors view their role as facilitators. Teachers provide information, resources and encouragement; it is the students themselves who are challenged to take advantage of these opportunities to make discoveries of their own and fulfill work they can be proud of.