High School | High Mowing School

Home to the oldest international Waldorf high school in North America that offers a full boarding program as well as a day school, our curriculum provides a well-rounded college preparatory experience that equips students for lives of meaning and purpose.

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While our curriculum is relevant for our time, you learn the timeless skill of how to learn. Immersed in challenging courses, you are encouraged to witness, explore, create, and engage deeply in developing and synthesizing your learning. As you question and deepen your understanding, you experience the power of persistence. Our project-based approach allows you to breathe: courses move from focused, core academic subjects to immersive learning experiences in language, movement, arts, music, nature, and drama. Project-based, experiential learning allows you to learn in the moment, and to connect thinking, sensitivity, and actions in a deeper way.

As a freshman and sophomore, you follow a structured course sequence that enables you to try new disciplines and experience different ways of learning. At the end of your sophomore year, with your advisor's guidance and parents' support, you review your first two years and create a plan for the next two. As a junior and senior, you have a broad choice of electives and are encouraged to chart your own path to graduation that reflects your unique interests and passions. As a senior, you complete your capstone project, which integrates experiential and academic modes of learning with public presentation, focusing on your specific interests or envisioned college major.

A Four-Year Journey

Grade 9 - Discovering Place

As a freshman, you observe and experience the world directly. In a year when feelings can be all consuming, we gently and intentionally direct you towards objectivity. We encourage you to practice close, accurate observation and clear recollection in various contexts. This innovative approach addresses the need to reconcile the world’s complexities while making sense of your own feelings.

What?

Grade 10 - Making Sense of the World

As a sophomore, you look for your place in the world and ponder how you fit into it. You seek an understanding of process, of how things emerge, grow and change. Our curriculum addresses such processes through the study of subjects such as development of language, inorganic chemistry, embryology, and ancient history, all taught in our innovative three and four week-long intensive block format. As the year progresses, we encourage you to move beyond black-and-white thinking to more balanced, inclusive thinking. You can see both sides of an argument and develop flexibility of thought and discourse through debate. It is an important sign of intellectual maturity to argue in favor of a proposition one does not actually support.

How?

Grade 11 - Finding Purpose

As a junior, with a growing capacity for self-reflection and self-knowledge, your search for identity continues with a new focus on existential questions. The theme of the junior year is the quest and the inner journey. You learn to live with open-ended questions and begin the long path towards answers that may not be what you expect. This is a time of strong idealism.

Why?

Grade 12 - Stepping into the World

As a senior, you strive to envision your own emerging place in the world, grappling with questions of identity and purpose. You have a new consciousness of yourself and of others. You connect with world events in a way you could not when you were younger. You imagine yourself as an active participant in the world and think deeply about how this might look.