Middlesex School

On the edge of Concord, Massachusetts, just 20 miles outside Boston, beyond an entry column of overhanging maples, you’ll find the sprawling green campus of Middlesex, an independent secondary school for boarding and day students in grades 9-12. Keep heading to your right and you’ll see the main schoolhouse, where a small community from across the world gathers to pursue an education built upon a curriculum of outstanding breadth and depth. Peek inside a classroom to see an intimate group of passionate students as they discuss, analyze, listen, laugh, strive and thrive.

The houses you’ll see on campus belong to our faculty, who open their doors day and night to talk with students about Hemingway, Newton, Caesar, the big game, that great concert, or nothing in particular. Academic expertise, commitment, and eternal energy, however, only partly define the faculty at Middlesex. Their passion for the careful development of complete, ethical teenagers is the true reason they’ve dedicated their lives to Middlesex.

You’ll notice facilities that foster our cherished sense of community. Stop by our theater and maybe you’ll catch one of our full ensemble Broadway musicals. Head over to our non-denominational Chapel to hear a speech from one of our seniors, or maybe some Beethoven from our chamber music ensemble. Check out the Student Center and shoot some pool before the school packs in for an a cappella jam. If you want to enjoy some athletic competition – elite or otherwise – head out to our fields, where every student wears the Middlesex colors with pride.

Middlesex School, both in the present and in the past, has preferred capacity in many areas to specialization in one. We believe a transparent and familiar community is an ethical community. We believe in our students. From the start, Winsor’s mission was to “find the promise that lies hidden” in every student, and that message of individuality, hope, and possibility guides us today. Our campus, designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm, remains centered on its iconic circle. We are fortunate to live in a beautiful setting that naturally brings our paths and our lives together. Radiating from a common sense of place and purpose, Middlesex continues to prepare its students for a changing world.

We have evolved in many ways since our founding over a century ago. We have undergone renovation, conservation, expansion, and constant transition in person and place. Yet our buildings, our fields, our programs, and our ethos still cleave to a human scale fostering collegiality and contact. Despite the school’s continuous transformation, our mission, with our students at the center, remains the same.

Middlesex School is an independent, non-denominational, residential, college-preparatory school that, for over one hundred years, has been committed to excellence in the intellectual, ethical, creative, and physical development of young people. We honor the ideal, articulated by our founding Headmaster, of “finding the promise” in every student, and we work together in an atmosphere of mutual trust and shared responsibility to help students bring their talents to fruition as knowledgeable, capable, responsible and moral citizens of the world. As a community, we respect the individual interests, strengths, and needs of each student. We also value the rich diversity of belief and experience each of us brings to the School. We expect that each student will bring his or her best efforts to the shared endeavor of learning and that the School, through its faculty, will engage and encourage each student’s growth, happiness, and well-being. We aspire for all Middlesex students to develop personal integrity, intellectual vitality and discipline, and respect for themselves and for others. We expect each student to engage energetically and cooperatively in the life of the School, and we seek to inspire in all students the desire to seek understanding of themselves and the larger world, both now and in their futures.

We believe in positive youth development, a growing body of psychological, developmental, and physiological research that focuses attention on the potential of adolescence rather than on its liabilities; the unique capacities for growth and development at a critical time in personal and physical development; and the benefit of a young person’s being a powerful, positive choice-maker in his or her growth, supported by a strong and supportive community and connected with principled, caring adults. We are a leading school offering mindfulness training for all of our students, and the early data shows that such training increases their sense of well-being, equanimity, and self-control in directing their energy. Learning to do hard things well is an invaluable life skill, and both the structures and practices of our school foster the development of broad and deep personal competence that begets authentic confidence that makes anything possible.