Waring School

The Waring School is a liberal arts school for students in grades 6-12. Our mission is to create and sustain a community of lifelong learners who are working together for the individual and the common good. Founded as a community approach to schooling in 1972, the campus is situated on 32 acres of land in beautiful Beverly, Massachusetts. Waring School upholds high academic standards, believing that rigorous study, self-motivation, and high expectations culminate in strong, rounded students with a sense of responsibility towards the past, present, and future of their community and the world. We strive to maintain a culture that honors and supports the human desire to learn. Stewardship of our school and the environment, service to the greater community, exposure to the arts and languages, and strong cultural connections are the backbone of our academic life.

Waring is a demanding, rigorous and vibrant learning environment. We reach beyond the quantitative norms of learning; we think, read, and discuss critically, and we engage with every area of the liberal arts, from science and humanities to athletics, technology, and the arts. Our system of narrative evaluation is a nuanced way of accurately assessing our progress in this endeavor: at Waring, we do not use letter grades, and the colleges our graduates attend, and the varied and impressive life and career paths our alumni take, all validate our students’ excellence. We ask each other to take risks in new, unfamiliar experiences—whether this be through travel, on the sports field, in a debate class, in the science lab, or performing in a Soirée Musicale—and we venture far into diverse areas of knowledge, history, and culture to better understand ourselves and our place in the world. For instance, all students share the common experience of our French language immersion and travel program, which is underscored by a month-long homestay in France.

Our mission is to create and sustain a community of lifelong learners who are working together for the individual and common good. Core Beliefs:

• Learning is an essential and defining human activity that involves the whole person throughout life.
• A learning environment should stimulate this powerful, inherently human desire to learn and to grow. Most learning in a lifetime takes place outside of school and one of the purposes of school is to prepare an individual to learn on his or her own.
• A supportive and stimulating learning culture affirms intellectual tolerance and social unity.
• Emphasis on community that occurs in all-school meeting, mixed-age tutorials, on camping trip and through the common language of French, validates shared experiences outside of the classroom.
• The ability to foster growth in others is the essence of leadership.
• Teaching and learning go hand-in-hand and most learning takes place within the context of relationships, including, but not limited to, faculty to students, students to students, faculty to faculty.
• Learning involves taking responsibility to develop and exercise one’s personal “voice” by publicly expressing what one is thinking and feeling. We seek to affirm the unique voice—spoken, written, and artistic—of each member of the Waring community.
• Learning compels us to use our knowledge responsibly in the service of multiple communities, both locally and globally.
• The liberal arts are those branches of knowledge that contribute to the liberation of the mind and imagination through risk-taking and through the application of our knowledge of the world and of ourselves.

At Waring, we believe that cultural proficiency is inherent to our mission and raises the bar for lifelong learning. We believe that by its very nature learning cannot happen in isolation; learning requires students to be part of a diverse community which actively encourages them to begin a lifelong engagement with cultural proficiency. Research shows that when students interact with peers different from themselves, they exert more intellectual effort and expand their horizons. A diverse school is therefore essential to promoting the high academic expectations central to Waring’s mission. We strive to be a school of ideas; a richer diversity of ideas and voices makes that endeavor both more effective and more meaningful. We also work to cultivate the analytical mind and expressive voice, investigating the whole human experience to better understand ourselves in the context of a diverse world.

Waring School’s educational program is based on the premise that, in order to learn, students must be challenged with worthy intellectual material, exciting creative projects and ample opportunities to display their talents and expand their ideas through meaningful interactions with peers and adults. However, simply creating a challenging program is not enough: the most powerful outcomes occur in a culture that reinforces the joy of learning. Creating this culture within a strong community is the primary mission of the School.