Darlington School

Darlington School is a coeducational day and boarding school established in 1905. At Darlington, we do more than prepare our students for college. We prepare them for life by emphasizing the pursuit of individual excellence in a diverse learning environment. Our students are the center of all that we do. Together, we challenge them to learn with passion, act with integrity, and serve with respect.

Each year, Darlington enrolls approximately 750 students in grades pre-K to 12. Our school community represents an average of 15 states and 20 countries worldwide. Stretching for 500 acres, Darlington’s campus is nestled around a small lake in the foothills of the Lookout Mountain Range in Rome, Ga., a medical center and college town located one hour from Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tenn. Darlington faculty and students continue a one-hundred-year-old tradition of challenging each other to grow into our fullest potential.

Darlington’s philosophical foundation stone is integrity of both individual and community, a foundation embodied in Darlington’s Honor Code. Darlington insists that every member of the community do his or her own work and respect the rules of community life. Our goal is to reinforce in each student the firm belief that success in every endeavor is the result of hard work honestly done, and that life in community must be based on respect for authority and the rule of law as embodied in our Judeo-Christian tradition.

Community life is abundant with service organizations, academic and athletic interest groups, spiritual fellowships, arts organizations, and residential life centered on a “house” system, where students experience small family within the life of the larger community. We offer students a variety of opportunities for leadership, service, exploration, and development as aspects of full individual development and rich community experience. Our goal is to instill in our students a respect for diversity and an ability to thrive both within and across boundaries.

Academic programs seek to be intellectually rigorous and demand the best of students at each level, but acknowledge and respect students’ differing abilities and different learning styles. We emphasize the pursuit of individual excellence. Our goal is to prepare students for a rewarding college experience and to inspire in our students a love of learning that will last a lifetime.

Sports programs emphasize both team and individual sports activities and challenge our students to excel in a competitive environment. In team sports, we instill a respect for the cooperative effort and the appreciation of individual contribution to a group outcome. In individual sports, we teach the value of self-reliance and fearless competition. In all our sports activities, our goal is to teach respect for the training, dedication to the effort, and graciousness in the outcome.

The Fine Arts program aims to foster in each student an appreciation for various modes of artistic expression and to nurture a capacity for their own artistic abilities while promoting self discipline, encouraging self confidence, and therefore meeting the needs of the whole child.

he 21st Century is characterized by a different type of thinking – a higher level of thinking that forces adaptation to today’s rapidly changing world. Darlington students can no longer be passive recipients of facts and figures that they dutifully memorize and just as dutifully forget after a quiz or test is turned in. In a world where knowledge is always expanding, our challenge as educators is to stay ahead of that expansion by teaching our students to become better thinkers. Darlington is committed to an academic program centered on developing just these sorts of critical and creative thinking skills. We are designing learning experiences from pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade that will grow our students into adults prepared for a lifetime of thoughtful living and learning.

Our first task in this endeavor is to encourage our children to stretch themselves to a higher level of thinking. The classroom instruction is no longer focused just on lower-level activities. Knowledge, comprehension and application are essential first steps on the thinking “ladder” that must also proceed to the higher levels of inference, analysis, interpretation, prediction and evaluation. Our students are naturally inquisitive, and it is our hope that a curriculum focused on critical thinking will provide them with those tools vital to promoting and even provoking that inquiry.

In addition to promoting critical thinking, Darlington classrooms foster creative thinking by celebrating the uniqueness of each child and by providing challenging, open-ended assignments that have more than one right answer. A classroom filled with creative thinking produces fluency, flexibility and originality while offering new ideas in a variety of diverse contexts and through an array of unique perspectives. A classroom that encourages creative thinking is a classroom of wonderful possibilities, and every room, court, field and office at Darlington will do so.

As future leaders and problem solvers, our students will regularly grapple with challenges that we can only imagine today. At Darlington, we invite our children to lead, to solve problems and to imagine every single day. That is what we mean by “child centered.”