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Are you thinking about sending your child off to private school? Then, you must decide which educational philosophy and approach works best for you. What it comes down to is whether you want to send your child to a school that uses a traditional approach to teaching or one that uses a non-traditional approach.

In the public school world, a traditional school is a regular public school, and a non-traditional school is a charter school. That's not what I am discussing here concerning private schools. The concept of a private school as a mainly independent self-financing corporate entity does not change. You and I will focus on what is taught in the classroom and how it is prepared.

The early years

Your child's age is a significant factor in choosing an educational approach. For example, if you send him to a Montessori school as a toddler, you expose him to a non-traditional approach to education. It is an excellent approach and is highly regarded. But non-traditional nonetheless. Start your child off in a Montessori, Waldorf, or Reggio Emilia school, and you will lay a solid foundation for learning in later life. But visit a traditional private primary school, and you will see a quite different approach to early education.

The apparent difference will be the dress code. Uniforms are required at many traditional religious schools. The curricula follow traditional blocks of science, math, language arts, and social studies. Add religion if the school is a faith-based private school.

In 2000, choosing a private school was at a crossroads. Back then you had the traditional ways of finding schools and finding out more about them. You asked around. Personal recommendations from family and friends were an important starting point. Indeed, they still are. Then you contacted schools you knew about and requested a catalog or brochures. You could also buy a print directory of private schools, if indeed one was available. (I still have a vintage copy of The New York Times Guide to New York City Schools written by Grace and Fred Hechinger and published in 1968.) And you could always hire an educational consultant. Researching schools was fairly labor intensive. It also took time.

It is remarkable how all that has changed in just a few short years. First, schools adopted websites as their primary means of reaching families. Today, in 2026, nearly every private school uses its website as the central hub for admissions information, virtual tours, tuition details, curriculum guides, calendars, and application requirements. The transition from printed materials to digital media has transformed the way families research schools. As we now use the internet for everything from banking to healthcare appointments, researching private schools online has become the natural starting point for most families.

Knowing What to Look For and Where to Look

I think that the toughest part

Progressive schools are different from so-called traditional schools. I am not being judgmental here. I am simply pointing out some differences between the two kinds of schools so that you can make an informed decision about which private schools to consider for your child.

Until the middle of the 20th-century, many schools simply taught their students facts and figures. You memorized and regurgitated information. Indeed I can remember being taught this way at Rosyln School and Westmount High School back in the '50s and '60s. That's just the way you were taught back then. All of your academic work was focused on what you could expect to be tested on in your final year-end exams. This all led inexorably to a forbidding set of examinations known as the Junior Matriculation. If you did well on that set of examinations administered at the end of Grade 11, you went off to university for more of the same.

Progressive schools by definition are schools that espouse the ideals and ideas of landmark educators and thinkers such as John Dewey and Francis Parker. At the beginning of the 20th-century, they were considered visionary by some, radical by others. The progressive curriculum was more varied and experiential. Students just didn't sit there passively listening to a teacher lecture about the material. They actually were encouraged to learn by discovery through a variety of hands-on activities. Teachers no longer had to get through a plethora of outdated materials simply to be able to say

Progressive schools are different from traditional schools. Their educational philosophies and teaching methods are different. Because there are so few progressive schools, relatively speaking - only about 75 schools call themselves progressive - most people are surprised when they discover that these schools even exist.

First, here is some of the background on the progressive movement here in the United States. The easiest way to understand how progressivism got started in this country is to realize that educators were also philosophers. For example, the Vermont native John Dewey (1859-1952) who founded the University of Chicago's which many consider the flagship of progressive education, was a distinguished philosopher as well as an educator. In a nutshell, Dewey knew that education was the way to make sweeping changes in society. After he had left the University of Chicago, Dewey founded in New York. The foundation of Dewey's approach to education rests on three lectures he gave back in the 1890s to raise money for his Laboratory School. The School and Social Progress, the School and the Life of the Child, and Waste in Education put forth Dewey's fundamental beliefs that education needs to be an interactive process in which the child discovers the relevance of his lessons to the real world outside.

This video offers an overview of John Dewey and his educational philosophy.

Dewey did not like

Are you thinking about something other than the usual public school experience for your toddler or primary school age child? If you are, then the next question you are most likely asking is exactly what kind of alternatives are out there anyway? How expensive are they? Are there schools in my area? How will the foundation these schools provide serve my child's future learning in grade school, high school and beyond? Let's take a look at each of these questions and offer some answers.

Early Education Options

Traditional teacher-led education? A follow the child approach as championed by Maria Montessori? The Steiner approach? Reggio Emilia inspired? Those are your broad choices.

Traditional teacher-led education remains popular. Most of us are familiar with this approach to teaching primary age school children because we ourselves are products of those classes. The public school system which I attended in Westmount, Montreal back in the '50s used that traditional approach. Indeed we all had desks lined up in rows. Looking back it seems rather quaint and not a little bit militaristic. But that's the way we were taught back then. We had homework. We were given grades. We are rapped on the knuckles if we misbehaved.

In the 21st century traditional teacher-led education is the norm in many schools both public and private. There are an infinite number of variations on this approach. Some retain the regimentation and strictness which we and our parents remember. Most, however, tend to have been softened