Education for life

Welcome to Guidepost Academy: we’re so glad you’re here! We believe that Guidepost Academy is a truly unique educational opportunity for middle and high school students. Take a look around the website, reach out with questions, or tour one of our schools. This is education not as it has been, but as it can be: something designed specifically for adolescents, something designed for life.

Adolescence is a period of intense physical and emotional growth. You are transitioning from childhood to adulthood—from depending on your parents, family, and teachers to a space where you decide your own path. What an incredible journey! What an exciting process, occasionally overwhelming, potentially fraught, inevitably profound. No matter where you spend these years, you will emerge on the other side having changed dramatically.

In many ways, traditional schools are at odds with the needs of this period of change: you’re forced to conform to a system that has at its core not your needs as a growing, changing, striving, individual—but the needs of the system itself. Alternative schools often allow you free rein to choose your own pursuits, skipping from project to project, but without that deep attention to knowledge that would fully unlock your mind’s potential. The alternatives are: rigid structure where knowledge is abstracted from application, or free structure where applications are abstracted from knowledge.

Guidepost Academy is the third option. Here, we pursue the union of thought and industry, of the mind and the hand. Our students don’t just memorize—they understand, by integrating and applying at every step. Each concept is placed into the world. Each lesson is motivated with the exploration of a real-world problem to capture the imagination and spark curiosity. From the introduction of the number line in mathematics to a Socratic discussion on the nature of the good life in liberal arts, here we find no conflict between the intellectual and the practical. And this continues as you mature and evolve through our program. By high school, you get the chance to master, apply, and expand knowledge on your own terms. Our students take film-making classes in order to actually make movies. They take economics courses because they are starting their own businesses—or more abstract economics because they want to understand the theories that make up the living human world in which they are preparing to take part.

One of our middle school classes in New York is running a thriving compost business; a high school student in Texas has a professional photography studio with international clients. Our students pursue internships in government, business, healthcare, and the arts. As a student at Guidepost Academy , you make sense of and shape your world. Adolescence is a time for belonging: not just in a local community, but to the great human project.

You might be asking: who are these incredible teenagers?

Who are these people who fall in love with knowledge, engage in intense debates on literature, seek out opportunities for adventure, and work together to create campus communities of mutual respect, engagement, and possibility?

In some ways, our students are extraordinary. In other ways, they are the most natural and healthy people of all: they are unusual only in that they are actualizing the potential that is perfectly, universally ordinary. You do not need to be an exceptional student to benefit from a school that will adapt to your needs, and you do not need to be struggling in traditional learning in order to thrive here.

Maria Montessori wrote, “The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.”

You are in a period of life where support and independence are needed in equal measure, and where the lack of either is equally destructive: an ability to survive is not a guarantee of thriving. At Guidepost Academy, you get to explore this period of transition into adulthood with graduated agency: each step you take here will open up greater choices, greater possibilities, and greater independence. But you will always have behind you the support, structure, and care of your coach, your guides, and your Guidepost Academy community. Here, you can fully explore your own rapidly expanding self.

We can’t wait to meet you.

Dr. Laura Mazer, MD MHPE