SCHOOL PHILOSOPHY
Valley School’s primary responsibility is to our children. We present a program centered on the concept of the continuous growth of the whole individual. Because of our School’s relatively small size, we can recognize individual needs and different rates of growth and maturation, and opportunities for success can exist for each child. We make a deliberate effort to develop the following habits: the ability to think; the self-discipline to work in a careful, imaginative, and independent manner; a willingness to trust and to cooperate positively with others; and the ability to risk and to adapt to new situations. We want our children to be honest with themselves and with others. We want them to be compassionate human beings.
Our goals are to build the foundations of academic and life skills necessary for self-confidence, academic success, and thoughtful decision making. To achieve these goals the teachers must draw continuously upon their imagination, experience, knowledge, and humor. Through their intellectual excitements, culture, and sympathetic response to a young person’s enthusiasm they can draw out the individual potentialities of the child. The School hopes, moreover, to develop in a child, through a stimulating curriculum, an awareness that learning requires effort and that each of us has some responsibility for his or her successes and failures.
The School’s curriculum comprises traditional subjects. Through this academic course work, our children strive to learn to read with understanding, reason carefully, and express themselves thoughtfully, clearly, orally and in their writing. The content of the curriculum is designed to lead a student to an appreciation of human interrelatedness, cultural heritage, creative potential, and the wonders of our natural and technological world. While our emphasis is on academic subjects, we also require participation and accomplishment in the arts, sports, electronic communication, outdoor and off-campus programs.
We know that we can achieve these goals only in a school community in which families and faculty communicate, aim high, are not discouraged by failure, and share a common purpose: the well-being and growth of our children.