What curriculum do you use?

It’s one of the most common questions we receive.

The short answer is simple:

We use the world.

Promontory does not purchase a packaged curriculum from a large publisher, and that choice is deliberate.

First, comprehensive boxed programs are expensive. That cost inevitably gets passed on to families. We prefer to invest directly in people, in small cohorts, sustained dialogue, and exceptional educators, rather than in shrink-wrapped materials.

Second, education is not static. By the time a mass-produced curriculum is printed, shipped, and implemented, it is already aging. In a world where knowledge evolves rapidly, flexibility matters.

But the deeper reason is philosophical.

Every large curriculum publisher carries an embedded worldview about what learning should look like — how fast it should move, how it should be sequenced, what should be emphasized, and what can be skimmed. When a program adopts a single purchased system, it implicitly adopts that perspective.

We choose not to be confined by one voice.

Instead, we design our own curriculum internally. That does not mean improvisation. It means clarity first.

We determine what intellectual habits we want students to develop: precision in mathematics, depth in reading, analytical writing, interdisciplinary thinking, sustained problem-solving, public reasoning. Then we go out and select — or build — the best resources available to serve those aims.

In mathematics, for example, that might include rich problem-solving texts such as The Art of Problem Solving, classical works like Mathematics for the Million, Jo Boler's methods, or carefully selected recreational challenges from Martin Gardner’s collections. It may include mental calculation techniques inspired by works such as Secrets of Mental Math, or structured algorithmic systems like the Trachtenberg method.

In other domains, we draw from primary sources, contemporary research, UNESCO and the UN SDGs, carefully chosen digital platforms, and materials we design ourselves as a faculty.

This approach is not scattershot. It is curated.

Finland — consistently one of the highest-performing educational systems globally — grants teachers substantial professional autonomy to design learning experiences suited to their students and their own pedagogical strengths. We respect that model. When teachers are reduced to delivering scripted lessons from purchased binders year after year, intellectual vitality diminishes. When educators are trusted as designers, their expertise grows — and students benefit.

A living curriculum is adaptive. It responds to student readiness. It incorporates emerging scholarship. It allows interdisciplinary connections to develop naturally rather than being forced into artificial boxes.

Most importantly, it places responsibility where it belongs: on the educators.

If we design the curriculum ourselves, we cannot blame a publisher. We must know exactly why we are doing what we are doing. That accountability strengthens rigor rather than weakening it.

There are extraordinary resources in the world today. When those resources are placed in the hands of deeply thoughtful, experienced educators working in small cohorts, the result is not chaos. It is coherence without confinement.

In a fast-moving world filled with opportunity and complexity, students do not need a program that trains them to complete pages. They need an education that trains them to think.

That is the curriculum we use.