Maximilian Montessori Academy

Maximilian Montessori Academy is a private school, founded in 1988 and serving Owensboro and the surrounding area. We educate children from pre-school through the completion of the high school years. Our school is pleased to be an outstanding source of schooling for local families and gladly shares in the goal of all schools: to provide children with the best education we possibly can. We offer a small, carefully designed environment, which provides some features that cannot conveniently be offered in the more traditional settings.

Maximilian Montessori Academy is nondiscriminatory; children of all races and religions are welcome. Unlike other private schools in the area, we are not a church-sponsored school; we respect each familys right to be responsible for whether their children are taught a religion and what kind. Character, however, is taught. All teachers and all schools shape character, either knowingly or carelessly. At Maximilian Montessori Academy we value honesty, consideration, reasonableness, integrity, courtesy, joy, independence and other essentials to civilized life. We believe that children’s capacities to recognize and enjoy truth, beauty and goodness are just as deserving of nurture as their capacities to read and to calculate. We openly accept responsibility for this nurture and expect wholehearted support from each child’s parents. The school is fundamentally Montessori in approach, meaning that we use Montessori materials and instructional methods, that we encourage initiative, and that each child progresses at his or her own natural pace. As in all schools, our curriculum includes a core of basics, the expected content areas (history, social studies, science, geography, etc. ) plus music, art, drama, physical education, foreign languages, field trips, and computer competence. We emphasize independent research, pride in achievement, self-management, and respect for rights and feelings of others. The Montessori method is not new; it was developed by Dr. Maria Montessori in the early part of this century and has spread throughout the world. The hallmark of this method is respect for the child. We allow children great freedom and we also teach them how to use this freedom wisely. The result is a love of learning and a degree of responsibility and independence rarely found in traditional educational settings. Because we emphasize individualized education, all children progress as rapidly as their capacities make possible. No child is ever held back to the average level of the class or to arbitrary standards expected of a particular age or grade; likewise a child who encounters a difficulty in learning will be given ample time and additional instruction to accomplish mastery. Naturally the concept of grade placement is meaningless in such an environment, except in its original sense of number of years in school. Indeed, Maximilian Montessori Academy has children of widely varying ages together in the same class, a lifelike setting that has both social and academic advantages. Although we have high expectations of our students, we neither pressure them nor limit learning to basic skills. Attitudes toward school acquired in the early years persist into a child’s later education and must not be neglected. School is a major influence in the development of a child’s self-concept, so we always work to maintain an environment which promotes this development and enhances self-esteem. Our children learn broadly, they learn how to learn, and most importantly, they are helped to enjoy the learning process. In the years since we first opened, our students have demonstrated uncommonly high growth rates in traditional areas (such as reading, mathematics and science), significantly higher than average measures of self-concept, and at the same time have acquired the initiative and responsibility necessary to handle our unique, nontraditional environment. Because our instruction is individualized, qualified children may be admitted at any time during the school year, provided that we have openings at that age level. At Maximilian Montessori Academy we believe strongly in what we do and we also believe that a child’s education will be far more important to the quality of his life than most parents realize. We are proud of having achieved our goals and of demonstrating the vital role of free enterprise in our country’s most important resource: the education of its people.