The Most Extraordinary 8th Grade on Earth
The Planet School is a one year private day school for 8th grade located in Bristol County, Massachusetts. Our students move between five different campuses that embody the pillars of our experiential curriculum—explore, design, build, serve—enabling an unrivaled level of personal and academic growth.
Chart your voyage into adolescence
The Planet School reimagines school as a joyful community on a rigorous journey of growth. This is only partially a metaphor: our students climb mountains, sail the open ocean, and walk across foreign countries.
Through encounters with nature and culture that test them physically, intellectually, and emotionally, students learn as much about themselves as they do the subjects that will carry them into high school. They emerge as teenagers with a planet-sized perspective and a maturity beyond their years.
One Year, Five Adventures
EUROPE
Walk the ancient Camino de Santiago through Portugal.
OCEAN
Sail a tall ship around Cape Cod studying the ocean.
FOREST
Construct an off-grid community from scratch.
DOWNTOWN
Launch a business and invest the profits.
MOUNTAINS
Roadtrip and backpack across America.
Explore
We practice physical exploration in our voyages as well as a mindset of curiosity: an eagerness to ask good questions and conduct thorough research.
Design
Visualize something that does not yet exist and communicate that vision. Our curriculum heavily employs design thinking principles.
Build
The process of creation. This ranges from physical construction to building better systems of governance for student-led projects.
Serve
We practice a model of service-based leadership where students are increasingly trusted with greater responsibility and stewardship of the school.
Learning Objectives
Subject Mastery
This is the primary focus of conventional middle school and is an important component of preparation for high school, but it is just the beginning of the Planet School curriculum. Because our subjects are tied directly to the real-world projects of each campus, retention is
Social and Emotional Intelligence
Strong Character and Moral Fiber
Creative Capacity
School is not working for many of us.
Disorienting “Busy Work”
Students feel disconnected from a sense of meaning in their lives and their work. The CDC found that 40% of teens had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” There is a sense that school is something you get through instead of a place where you work on important topics that matter.
Feeling Isolated
Half of teens do not feel a sense of belonging within their school communities and only 1 in 4 students felt that the adults at their school cared “a lot” about their well-being and success. Middle school in particular is where students begin to check out academically and bullying can intensify social isolation. We are stranding teens when they are forming their sense of identity instead of helping them craft a vision for themselves and the world they want to live in.
College Admissions Obsessed
School feels like a conveyer belt inside a one-size-fits-all education factory: get the right test scores, join the right clubs, get accepted into to the right college. The immense pressure causes burnout and the fear of failure can be overwhelming. Instead of completing intentional, character-defining rites of passage, students walk across a graduation stage and, suddenly, are expected to know how to be adults.
Now imagine what learning could be.
Authentic Purpose
Imagine preparing for high school with one of the most fulfilling years of your life. Students wake up every morning with a sense of purpose, enabling the shouldering of real responsibility. You will finish middle school with a portfolio of tangible work that you can put onto your resume or into a compelling college application.
Inspirational Community
Imagine learning alongside educators doing the most fulfilling work of their careers and bringing that inspiration to their student interactions everyday. Teamwork and leadership are intentionally cultivated as part of the curriculum during school, not just after school. Students feel supported when they make mistakes, because safe opportunities to fail are essential in the process of doing great work.
Opportunity-Awakening
Imagine middle school feeling like a runway designed for liftoff: graduates have the perspective and capacity to get started with the next chapter of your life. You have not just studied different subjects inside a classroom, you have participated in them. Whether public high school or private boarding school, you are ready to engage fully with the next phase of your education.
