What are we about?
ESM exists to provide an education for students living in Mongolia that is genuinely English in style and substance.
Our essential background is both innovative and traditional, based on democratic and liberal thinking. We encourage individuals and not a system.
The English educational tradition, especially as seen in its best independent institutions (which include many of the most famous schools in the world) has a number of distinctive features that are now being copied, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.
ESM seeks to replicate some of these in its campus in Ulaanbaatar:
A self-starting and true love of learning and scholarship among the students which in turn will generate high academic standards and results.
A belief in the individual, reflected in flexible teaching techniques, encouragement of spontaneity, independence of thought and judgment.
The essential place of team sports as well as other athletics pursuits in every student’s school week. Fitness, competition, team spirit, skills’ development and good sportsmanship are all highly important
A culturally rich life is the essence of the civilized person. Our students need wide reference points in the artistic world: painting, acting, choral and orchestral music, literature, film, the media-a really deep feeling for all of these.
The best English schools produce students who are questioning, intellectually alert, leading players in a team, ice-breakers rather than consolidators. So does ESM.
We aim to attract the brightest and the best to run, work and teach in our school; in turn to guide the brightest and best of the future.
ESM will seek to prepare its students for the challenges of today’s world. They will be people sensitive to the disparities of opportunity and lifestyle among the world’s inhabitants and also socially responsible in trying to improve the lives of others. Our students are wired to the immediate urgency of safe guarding the planet and equally to the individual requirements of those in need.
Kindness, good manners, consideration for others: ESM hold these to be important too and not to be trodden down in the rush to succeed.
The spirit of ESM is that of a large family: full of vitality, boisterous and pensive, ambitious yet respectful, keen to change and to conserve. Students, staff and parents are all contributors to the ever-evolving development of our school.
We must have time too, as Mongolians so clearly do, for the fun and humour of life along the way.
ESM is about optimism. Our students should be among the movers and shakers, the improvers, the new thinkers and doers for the 2020s and 2030s.
Our mission statement in Latin reads: Non scholae, sed vitae discimus. We teach and learn not just at school, but for life itself.