Profile

The boarding school is an important step between home and university studies or professional training. In the learning and living community at Schulzentrum Marienhöhe, community spirit, the ability to work in a team and the sense of responsibility are trained. Values, objectives and rules of the boarding school are based on the Christian image of man. In addition, our boarding school life rests on three own columns which are closely intertwined in everyday matters: Education, Faith, Fellowship.

Education

Education, as we understand it, means not only academic training to reach good graduation results. We also teach our students practical skills and the cultivation of nobleness which are essential to meet future challenges. Experiences like handling formalities on your own, managing to live together with so many other people or earning part of your school fees by working on the campus enable attendants of our boarding school to walk into their future life with a greater independence and, therefore, a bigger self-esteem.

Life at a boarding school offers the unique chance to manage school assignments and requirements together even outside of the usual study times. Living door to door means also to drop by and inquire about something or study together for the upcoming exam. It can mean to meet one of the teachers living on the campus while jogging and get valuable tips for the next class test. It means to benefit from our modern media library which supports any eagerness to study with lots of books, encyclopedias and other media. And it means to get help from qualified tutors in the “Learning Office”.

Faith

Schulzentrum Marienhöhe is a Christian school. As Christians, we know that through love and forgiveness we are deeply accepted and valued by God and commissioned to live our lives in freedom and responsibility.

It is neither required to be a Seventh-day Adventist nor expected to become one. What is indispensable, however, is a positive openness for the Christian faith because it is the core of our school and especially of our boarding school.

Faith can be discovered, lived and shared better in a community than alone. Christian values are trained together in daily live. By participating in activities of the youth group of our local church many positive contacts are made, friendships develop and self-esteem is growing through tasks and goals.

In addition, the school and church offer a variety of activities to get to know the biblical God better, for example the major subject “Religion”, morning devotionals in class, evening devotionals in the boarding school groups, bible studies from three pastors, bible talks for teens by teens, youth choir, praise and worship evenings, school devotional services, youth worship services, weeks of spiritual emphasis, youth camps.

Fellowship

A boarding school is like a big patchwork family. One aspect is, of course, to find friends that very often become friends for life. Another one is that in living together young people learn not only to tolerate diversities but by doing this also grow as persons. Integrating and asserting oneself; learning to address things; dealing with disappointments without giving up the other person; getting involved in projects together; to distance oneself without hurting; negotiating compromises; agreeing on something as a group; dealing with others being different; coping with feedbacks; accepting oneself … all this happens, of course, not only in the boarding school. But it happens here in a more intensive, condensed way: growing up in fast-forward mode but with a safety net and double bottom through pedagogic support.

In addition, the boarding school is an ideal place to discover together skills and talents as well as personal strengths and weaknesses in the daily routine and the many activities and highlights of boarding school life, for example band and choir, participation in pathfinder groups or the Marienhoehe Energy Agency, cooking, meet-and-greet weekend, formal night, week of spiritual emphasis, sports, development cooperation in Cambodia.

Rules

Fellowship cannot be “created”. A community grows with the appropriate framework. We are convinced that transparent, explicit and fair rules are the framework that give young people confidence in togetherness. Here, too, our mission statement is the basis for our educational goals but also for the way towards them. We consider our rules as guide rails that emphasize what we want and what we do not want.

If rules represent the guide rails of pedagogic efforts, relationship is the supreme discipline. Through different socializing activities and conversations we want to establish a trust-based relationship with our young people. Our interest in a young person and her or his well-being, honesty and authenticity are the foundations of a relationship that keep up even in difficult times.

We also try to have a positive influence on the relationships between our young people. If needed, mediated discussions create an awareness that agreements are not only necessary but can also be made without one being the loser.

Ideally, a young person leaves our school not only with a good academic qualification but also with social skills, capacity for teamwork, self-acceptance, and the willingness to commitment to fellow men, environment or society.