University of Chicago Laboratory Schools

The Laboratory Schools are home to the youngest members of the University of Chicago's academic community. The Laboratory School ignites and nurtures an enduring spirit of scholarship, curiosity, creativity, and confidence. We value learning experientially, exhibiting kindness, and honoring diversity.

Being part of the University of Chicago means that the importance of intellectual life—of thought and exploration—infuses everything we do across all aspects of our curriculum. Families who choose Lab care deeply about curiosity, inquiry, and creativity. All are attracted to a diverse community and an environment that creates and nurtures the habits of expansive thinking and complex problem-solving.

As the Laboratory Schools head toward our 125th anniversary in 2021, we are focused on delivering the most outstanding education to our students, and doing it in a manner that instantiates the core values of the University of Chicago. 

Lab empowers and educates all children to ask questions, develop paths of inquiry, and challenge conventional thinking in pursuit of original ideas. As is true across the University, inquiry is at the heart of what we do. Our children, in partnership with one another and their teachers, ask not just Why? but What if? and How come? and pursue those lines of inquiry—and resulting answers—down any number of paths.