Our Mission

Atlas Montessori High School’s mission is to cultivate education with purpose.

Atlas MHS uses the Montessori philosophy as a platform to work with our vibrant local and global communities, and strives to empower teens to create lasting positive impacts for a more sustainable and harmonious world. Within a multi-age classroom setting, students will have access to social-emotional learning, practical living skills, and a competency-based curricula that optimizes learning via personal interest. Through a holistic and interdisciplinary approach, students will be prepared for young adulthood, college, and beyond.

 

Our Philosophy: The Montessori Method

Many parents of Montessori children, or those familiar with the Montessori pedagogy, may already know how extensive and in-depth the Primary (ages 3-6) and Elementary (ages 6-12) curriculum is. There are specific materials, key lessons, stories, and follow-up activities that allow the students to learn in accordance to their natural development. This, however, is not quite the case for Adolescence (ages 12-18). While Dr. Montessori included adolescents in her theories of human development, a more detailed exploration was cut short by her death in 1952. Therefore, much of what we have learned about middle and high school-aged students is due to the tireless work of passionate Adolescent guides over many decades.

 

Dr. Montessori believed that adolescent students should spend time close to nature and away from the family, preferably on a farm (she called this environment Erdkinder). Adolescents crave social experience with their peers, purposeful work that contributes to their communities, and opportunities that help them discover their inner selves. In our modern world, we must adapt Dr.  Montessori’s ideas of the Erdkinder - above all, she believed that the learners’ environment must be appropriate for their culture, time, and place. Therefore, we at Atlas have developed a community and project-based curriculum that follows our high schoolers' natural development while aligning to state and federal curricular standards.

 

Our goal is to provide not just an academic learning environment but a space in which students feel safe to explore their interests; to try on ‘different hats’ as they figure out who they are and what values are important to them; and as they meet people throughout the community who can provide new experiences, skills, and perspectives. We want to honor the goals, accomplishments, and diversity of our students while helping them be a part of the Vancouver/Portland area and the world at large.