Mission & Vision

Mission  (What we are)
The Toronto New School is an intimate learning environment in which each student acquires confidence, intellectual tools, life skills and adaptable habits of mind. Our school encourages students to be themselves and recognizes that instruction is only effective when it can be attached to meaningful experience. We prepare students, better than all others, for success at the post secondary level.

Vision (How we do it)
We treat our students like the adults that they will become.  Our teachers and students are on a first name basis, promoting trust, accountability and, most of all, engagement.

Our Academic Philosophy (How they learn)
Our liberal arts and science ethos encourages cross-functional learning, socratic dialogue and lifelong self-education. We believe that the principal barrier to teenage learning is boredom.  We overcome this obstacle by promoting education as an ongoing conversation between student and teacher.

Values
Not only do we promote thought… we also promote thoughtfulness.  We don’t believe in cliques.  We don’t believe in labels.  You see the result in our students’ respect for their teachers and each other as individuals.

Our school is ‘new,’ ‘avant-garde’ and takes a unique approach to education. But the name “New School” is also steeped in history.

In 1919, a group of unconventional thinkers, including historian Charles Beard and philosopher John Dewey, imagined an educational venue where ideas could be discussed freely, without censorship. They published a brochure listing their lectures and opened their school, which they called The New School for Social Research, to all “intelligent men and women”. It offered a curriculum that emphasized the social, political, economic and educational issues of the time.  Many celebrated scholars taught there in the first few years, including Lewis Mumford, Bertrand Russell and Felix Frankfurter.

The “new” in our name is both a description of our innovative approach and a homage to the legacy of some exceptional educational pioneers. We have been inspired by the past to forge an exciting new future for high school students in the City of Toronto.