Founders Gus and Marty Trowbridge were encouraged by judicial decisions in favor of equal opportunity and inspired by the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the 9-10s, the primary focus is Migration to the Americas, and students take class trips to Washington Heights and even Ellis Island.

In the sixth grade, students learn about the Civil Rights Movement, by delving into autobiographies, watching documentaries, and even putting together a play, which is presented at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. assembly.

Students read a wide variety of novels, and with 7th and 8th graders, a Shakespeare play is incorporated in the year's curriculum annually.

Novels and plays that students have read as part of the curriculum include The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo and Juliet .

Students tend the gardens, care for the animals (chickens, cows, pigs and sheep), learn to weave, explore fields, mountains and streams, and study traditional and contemporary life in the Catskills.

Farm trips emphasize human dependence on natural processes and community members' reliance on each other.

At the same time they examine the economies of nature, in the wild and on the farm, and determine the best measures for environmental conservation.

Sharing these activities, attending daily classes, and performing household and barn chores, the students come to function as a mutually reliant community.

Morning and evening barn chores include egg collecting, feeding animals and cleaning their pens.

Morning and afternoon classes include meal planning and cooking, churning butter, baking bread, and preserving garden produce; seasonal farm work such as planting and harvesting, assisting with sheep shearing, and collecting sap to boil into maple syrup; outdoor maintenance work such as fence repair, caring for nature trails, splitting fire wood, and keeping the wood bins stocked; textiles processes such as carding, spinning, dyeing and weaving the wool from our sheep; nature field trips in the woods and fields and along the streams on the farm; hikes to scenic promontories in the Catskills and visits to other farms or places of historical interest.

The concepts behind the plan were originally developed by Frank Roosevelt and Hugh Southern in the context of intense debates during early years of MCS.

That scale is, in part, based on the "cost per child" which is the total budget divided by the number of students (with some adjustment for grade level).

The principle behind this is that families of means should not be subsidized by annual giving or the endowment; this is in contrast to many other schools which have a "gap" that represents the difference between tuition and the actual cost of educating a child.