Blue Mountain School

Contemplative Education – Blue Mountain School helps students develop their awareness, concentration, and insight. We strive to use processes that illuminate the innate wisdom of human beings and cultivate a growing sense of peace and wonderment in everyday life.

We practice:
The exploration of Wisdom Traditions near and far as a means to understand the spirit;
Poetry and storytelling as a means to explore the human condition;
Movement arts as a means to explore and enhance one’s sense of physical connectedness and awareness;
Silence and meditation as a means for reflection and inner awareness; and
Self-reflection and self-mastery techniques as a means to act with intention and thoughtfulness.

Progressive Education – Blue Mountain School promotes Social-Emotional Learning and critical thinking through experiential activities and creative expression in a collaborative, project-based curriculum.

We practice:
The development of intrinsic values over extrinsic punishment-reward systems;
Teacher-student collaboration in the learning process; ‘doing with’ instead of ‘doing to’;
Social-Emotional Learning to meet a child’s social, emotional, and intellectual needs;
A Project-based curriculum with subjects overlapping, as they often naturally do; and
Creative expression and reflection as a tool to find meaning and internalize learning.

How do the Contemplative and Progressive models work together?
Combined, these practices provide a holistic approach to education that nurtures the mind and the heart, the rational and the creative, the physical and the metaphysical; together, the Contemplative and Progressive models honor the whole child.