WILTON – Nestled away from any real stream of traffic or distracting hubbub, the High Mowing School, 222 Isaac Frye Highway, more than endured the pandemic; it has continued to offer children from early childhood through high school the opportunity to continue to grow intellectually and artistically.

Founded in 1942, the High Mowing School is an accredited Waldorf co-educational school, serving day, boarding and homestay students in Wilton. But its limits aren’t set to just New Hampshire; the educational institution reaches beyond the United States into many countries where students travel to America to study abroad to learn about and share in different cultures.

High Mowing School director of creative content and social media marketing Kendal Bush said the international boarding school has students from over 20 countries. One campus serves students K-8 and a second serves high school students.

“The thing that really sets Waldorf apart is that so much of the curriculum is hands-on,” she said. “Even with science, not giving a student a textbook but giving them information or an experiment to do is how it’s done here. This happens with every class where the information is presented and the student is able to absorb it.”

The student is then given a task so that their learning is based on that project.

“If they’re given an experiment, the question might be, ‘What do you think that you’re going to find?'” Bush said. “‘How was the process of finding it and what was your answer?’ That approach really goes across the board with so much of the curriculum at every level.”

The philosophies of Waldorf examine what’s taking place during a child’s development. Bush said that on the grade school level, “it’s very thought out.”

“There is the nine-year change that typically happens in the third or fourth grade,” she explained. “And there are different things that are happening emotionally and physically with the students that is part of how the curriculum is presented.”

Student events normally happen for that class every year. For the fifth graders, they’ve been learning about ancient civilizations.

“The other day, as part of their focus on Greece and Greek mythology and history, the students trained the whole year for this pentathlon event,” Bush said. “In a non-COVID year, they commonly go to Lake Champlain or one of the other Waldorf schools in New England or northern New York state. All the schools will gather and it’s all fifth graders.”

Bush said they all study the same curriculum and those studies are so similar because of the tenets of the ages and the grades.

“So other Waldorf schools all over the world in fifth grade, they’re doing a lot of the same stuff,” she said. “It’s just so cute – the students are training with their teacher every morning. They’re running, they’re doing long jump, they’re doing javelin and discus. It’s really team building and it’s a further absorption of the curriculum to really think about what Greek society was like.

With the arts and athletics so much a part of every culture, Bush said that lessons and their meanings are taken so many steps further than students just following textbooks in a classroom.

“That’s one example of how you can take one thing that’s very hands-on and very interactive with the student,” she said. “And it’s completely reinforcing things that they’re learning and things that they’ll continue to take through high school.”

Bush said that in the sixth grade, “they’re studying the medieval games, being creative and supporting their teammates. And annually, each class from first grade to the high school level does a play.”

“The play is based in something tied into the curriculum,” she said. “So, for example, at the high school level, students who are in a Shakespeare class will do a Shakespeare play. And the teacher for that class, Wendy Bruneau, says ‘Shakespeare was meant to be played. Shakespeare didn’t intend for people to sit and read what he wrote. It was meant to be on stage.'”

And while the Mowing School isn’t a religious school, third graders have been studying Hebrew. All world religions are a part of the curriculum as well, from an historical standpoint.

“Those types of things are very core to the Waldorf philosophy,” Bush stated.

The international aspect of intermingling students from different parts of the world and from different cultures also fully adds to the experience of attending the High Mowing School. The founder, Beulah Hepburn Emmet, according to Bush, was a “real firecracker.”

“She was a cool maverick, kind of lady,” she said. “When she started the school, she wanted to make it accessible. She didn’t want this to be some elitist bubble up here on the hill. She really wanted to make it accessible to anyone who wanted an education.”

The demographic of where the international students are coming from has changed through the years.

“When I started, we had a very large Asian population,” Bush said. “Students from China, Thailand – we have a student from Thailand now and a student from Tibet and Nepal.”

Bush said that when she started, the school began a Chinese exchange at the lower school, where they had middle school students come from China and stay for English immersives for three months. COVID put quite a wrench in any Asian programs that were going on, because of how America was perceived in handling the virus.

“Hopefully, that’s going to come back,” she said of the exchange. “That was a really strong partnership. It was a wonderful thing. We had students on the grade school level who would do a big presentation on the Chinese New Year and share their culture with us.”

It was called the East-West program.

Bush said there was a time when many of the students were European, hailing from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

“That’s where Waldorf really had its start,” Bush shared.

For the last couple of years, High Mowing has seen an uptick in students from Central and South America, Latin America and Africa.

“We have a competitive soccer program,” Bush said. “It’s a partnership with Black Rock Residential Academy and they do the recruiting and the finding of student athletes.”

Bush said that’s changing the look and demographics of the school, which she called, “beautiful.”

“We have all these students from all over the world and different situations,” she said. “We have four girls who play soccer and they’re really good – they’re from South Africa. This is like game-changing and life-changing. To come from a society that is completely racist and completely segregated and oppressive if you’re dark skinned – to come here, where one student is even getting a scholarship. That would have never have happened for her at home.”