The Barrie School
Curriculum Guide: Age 3 — 12
A Philosophy Of Curriculum
by Tim Seldin, Headmaster, 1971-93
The Barrie School is designed to prepare children both for university and for life.
There are three key ideas that are central to our mission as a school:
- It is not the adult who shapes the child; it is the child who, through his experiences, creates an adult human being.”
- Teaching is not something that one can do to another, we can only facilitate the natural process of learning.
- There is a clear connection between one’s sense of self, of being fully alive and open to new ideas and experience, and ability to learn.
Recognizing this, we are engaged in a process of facilitating the development of self-actualized renaissance men and women.
Such people are teacher-proof. They have learned how to learn, and see school as a center of an enjoyable lifelong experience. Children with values such as these will normally go on to college, perhaps after first taking a year off for work or travel, as the natural extension of their previous education.
For some time we have been struggling to resolve the debate over the appropriate balance between our objective of cultivating the child’s spontaneous interest in learning, and the expectations of parents and society.
Normally a school is perceived as the transmitter of culture from one generation to the next through a formal curriculum. This is certainly an important part of our mission. However, as a Montessori school, we are equally committed to the development of responsible members of the human family, and the protection of the child’s fragile spark of curiosity and creativity.
Most children know far more about the world before they start school then the will show a few years later when they have learned to be passive learners who don’t trust their senses, intellect, and imagination. Therefore, our greatest task is to help our students to rediscover their brain’s ability to think, intuit, and discover; to develop a sense of independence, sequence, and order; to learn how to learn.
At the same time, as an independent school, parents come to us and pay a great deal of money in tuition for services available from the government schools for which they have already paid through their taxes.
They come to us seeking quality programs and services!
Their highest priorities are:
1. academic excellence
2. character development
Clearly they expect their children to be well prepared for university, but beyond this, they are looking for a school experience that will offer something special that will make the school experience intellectually exciting and develop a wide-range of talents and interests.
The delivery of these services is difficult to document from our end, and from the parent’s end, even more difficult to evaluate.
Thus, parents expect to be kept abreast of the programs that address these goals, and, their children’s progress in each program.
As a result, we work carefully to maintain this delicate balance.
Our curriculum can be thought of as having two aspects:
1. The school’s basic expectations for what will be first introduced, worked on, or reviewed and targeted for mastery by 85%-90% of all students at each age/grade level.
2. The lessons that arise out of the children’s natural curiosity. While we follow a planned syllabus to give us cohesion and structure, we should never be satisfied with a year spent giving students set lessons from the prescribed syllabus: in order to satisfy, and at the same time, stimulate the children’s interest, we have to farther and faster than that! By providing the children with all sorts of books, pictures, specimens, and artifacts, we can almost guarantee that we will stir up their curiosity and encourage them to expand their scope of learning horizontally. By this, we mean to suggest that, instead of moving on through the set curriculum more quickly, that we allow the children to explore additional related topics that capture their interest.
Our curriculum should be designed to intrigue children and develop in them a lifelong love of learning. No topic is presented just once and forgotten; lessons are introduced quite concretely in the early years and are reintroduced later at increasing degrees of complexity and abstraction. Students at The Barrie School gain experience and develop skills at one level of understanding, which prepares them for more complex lessons at the next level.
The spiral of the Montessori curriculum has no end, and the depth to which any topic can be pursued is limited only by a student’s interests and ability. At the same time, our expectations as a college preparatory school are quite high; challenging each student to his/her fullest individual potential, and establishing a clear standard of achievement and quality of thought and work. We encourage accelerated students to expand their studies horizontally, researching topics at greater depth and a more sophisticated level of thought and analysis.
Our course of study is consciously multi-disciplinary. It is an examination of the natural world and the human experience that interconnects the traditionally separate subject disciplines. Units of study often cut across the curriculum, weaving together, as one example, the land, flora and fauna, folk tales, art, dance, poetry, architecture, history, everyday life, and cooking of a country under study.
Our curriculum has no outer limits except for humanity’s knowledge and imagination. At the same time, our core curriculum has been carefully structured to establish benchmarks for achievement of the normal student by the end of each level within the Academy. While we recognize that some students may not, for one reason or another, keep up with all of the benchmarks for his or her age level, they define a standard of our expectations.
At its finest, Montessori is an incredibly elaborate model of education. We don’t advocate using all these tricks and devices simply to make the school day pass more pleasantly or to better prepare students for their standardized tests at the end of the year. These are only secondary objectives. The real aim of education as we see it at The Barrie School is to prepare children to live lives filled with personal satisfaction, as responsible, concerned citizens of the Earth. An important element in achieving that goal is the development of knowledge and understanding about the world today: civilization. However, along with this must come self knowledge, self-respect, compassion, and a mind and heart open to new ideas and information. Our goal is to help children to learn how to learn.
