A Middle School Your Child Actually Loves
How many of us can say we remember our middle school years fondly? Qualia reworks the middle school mold entirely, replacing a typical 6th-8th grade atmosphere of meaningless drudgery, social pressure, and grim endurance with a lively space where authentic inquiry, intellect, originality, empathy, and self-acceptance thrive. At the Qualia Middle School, students have a voice in their education and in their lives. As a result, they embrace their intellectual passions and develop strong, independent identities. Ultimately, Qualia Middle School students become adults for whom the sky is truly the limit: they are afraid neither to challenge themselves nor to positively transform the world around them.
Authenticity and Intrinsic Motivation
Qualia’s middle school is a seminar-style laboratory for learning where students do not simply encounter concepts, but actually generate important ideas in a wide range of academic and artistic fields.
Our middle school students develop their authentic selves through a healthy combination of intellect and social-emotional awareness. They learn that wisdom means peeling back layers and layers of questions to reveal even more questions. Ultimately, they become self-motivated learners and creators as well as intellectual and artistic collaborators.
Passion-driven Learning
Tailored Collaboration
Our middle schoolers work closely with faculty mentors to co-create curriculum and assignments based on shared interests. Through this passion-driven, collaborative process, students achieve the most lasting reward for their deep, relevant work: an immeasurable commitment to and fascination with learning itself and a desire to contribute uniquely and profoundly to the world.
At regular intervals, faculty provide detailed narrative assessments and proficiency ratings of student work in place of traditional grade reports. Through this student-centered evaluation process, middle schoolers come to understand their strengths and challenges. The combination of self knowledge and individually tailored support gives students the confidence to take intellectual risks and to follow previously unimagined avenues of growth.
