At Stevenson, we strive to foster a passion for learning and achievement while helping our students shape a joyful life. We understand that joyful learning and academic achievement are not mutually exclusive – learning is far more powerful and enduring when driven by curiosity, wonder, and the freedom to explore big ideas in the company of expert guides and highly motivated peers.”

— Dan Griffiths, President

Stevenson’s Mission

Stevenson School has long been committed to a mission described by three central aims:

  • to prepare students for success in school and their lives beyond school;
  • to foster their passion for learning and achievement;
  • to help them shape a joyful life.

Our Motto

Our school motto, “Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re”, “gentle in manner, resolute in deed,” encapsulates our approach to learning and living in community.

At Stevenson, our faculty and staff are honored to help shape the future of our students, inspiring a lifelong commitment to learning, and partnering with Stevenson families to instill cherished values. We aim for our children to be kind, compassionate, and to actively seek to be a force for good wherever they are.

Our core values include safety, respect, trust, belonging, and inclusion. In practicing these values in all of our dealings, whether observed or unseen, we seek to create an environment that is truly conducive to everyone’s personal and academic growth. 

Because we believe that people perform and relate to one another best in such an environment, our student handbooks for the lower and middle and upper divisions promote and protect the standards required for our students to thrive and for the School to succeed in its mission. They are framed by our values and emanate from a place of purposeful care for and commitment to our students’ development as people.

Our honor code reads as follows:

We assert a personal code of honor that compels honesty with ourselves and in our dealings with others, courage in accepting responsibility for our decisions and actions, and commitment to seeking fulfillment in our best work.

The School’s Latin motto, Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re (“Gentle in manner, resolute in deed”) emphasizes humility and perseverance. 

The song, a frequent feature of assemblies and other gatherings on the Carmel campus, is taken from a lyric written by our namesake, the 19th century Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, and arranged by Chris West, who served as the lower and middle divisions’ music teacher for many years.

We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell;
For the love that unites us;
For the peace accorded us this day;
For the hope with which we expect the morrow;
For the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies,
That make our lives delightful;
And for our friends in all parts of the earth.

The prayer is also adapted from the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson, who spent a brief portion of his life here in 1879, arrived as a sickly expatriate on the most desperate of romantic quests, pursuing Fanny Osborne, who he would later marry. He was nursed back to health by a goat rancher in Carmel Valley and a restaurateur in Monterey who took him in as a stranger and extended to him every possible kindness. It is fitting that this story sits as the kernel of our School’s inception, because this is what we do: welcome strangers on quests, help them get better, and deliver them on to meet their destiny. And, regardless of our religious beliefs or skepticism (Stevenson is non-denominational), our prayer is meant to invoke the spirit of reverence that connects all Pirates to the School and to one another.

O Lord, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come,
That we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
And in all change of fortune and down to the gates of death,
Loyal and loving to one another.
Amen.

Carmel Campus Aerial Shot