Three Immigrant Women, Three Continents of Teaching Experience, One School in Washington, DC.
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In This Guide
Most schools trace their founding to a single benefactor or a board of trustees. Maret’s origin story is stranger and more personal: three sisters from a small French village near Geneva, Switzerland, who each left home to teach on three different continents before two of them reunited with the third in Washington, DC, and built a school together.
Quick Answer for Busy Parents
Maret School was founded in 1911 by three immigrant sisters, Marthe, Louise, and Jeanne Maret, who had left their home village of Marignan, near Geneva, Switzerland, at the turn of the twentieth century to teach abroad. Marthe, who became blind at age 18, settled in Washington, DC; her sisters Louise and Jeanne, who had been teaching in Russia and the Philippines respectively, eventually joined her, and together the three founded Maret in 1911 with the explicit goal of bringing an international flavor to American education.
From Marignan to Washington: How the Maret Sisters Got Here
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Marthe, Louise, and Jeanne Maret left their home village of Marignan, close to Geneva, Switzerland, to pursue teaching careers abroad, a genuinely unusual path for young women of that era. Louise taught in Russia, Jeanne taught in the Philippines, and Marthe, who had become blind at age 18, settled in Washington, DC. By 1911, Louise and Jeanne had made their way to Washington to join their sister, and together the three women, inspired by their international teaching experience, founded what would become Maret School.
Why the Sisters Started a School At All
The sisters’ shared international background shaped Maret’s founding philosophy directly: rather than replicate a single national model of education, they aimed to bring together the best of what each had encountered while teaching across three different countries. That founding instinct, combining rigor with a genuinely global outlook, still echoes in Maret’s current World Languages program, which spans Arabic, Chinese, Classics, French, and Spanish, an unusually broad offering for a K-12 school of Maret’s size.
A Century on the Same Campus
Maret has served students on its Cathedral Avenue campus for over a century, a genuine rarity among Washington, DC independent schools that have relocated, merged, or closed over the same period. The school marked its centennial in 2011 with a commissioned history, Maret School: The First Hundred Years, written by presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Maret’s motto, Noscere Vivere Est (“To Learn Is to Live”), and its four core values, Respect and Integrity, Excellence and Creativity, The Individual and Connectedness, and Joy, are presented by the school as a direct throughline from its founding sisters to its current community.
That continuity is worth noting for families comparing Maret against newer or more recently relocated schools in the region. A century-plus on one campus means generations of Maret families, some now sending grandchildren through the same halls their own parents once walked, which shapes the school’s culture in ways a newer institution simply can’t replicate.
Why This History Matters for Applicants Today
A century-old founding story is more than trivia for a family evaluating fit. Maret’s own framing, that its founders were international, entrepreneurial women building something genuinely new rather than replicating an existing model, is worth testing against what a family actually observes on a campus tour or interview.
A family that values that specific kind of institutional identity, small, historically continuous, and deliberately international in outlook, may find Maret’s founding story a genuine signal of fit, not just a pleasant anecdote.
Curious How Maret’s History Shapes Its Culture Today?
Cardinal Education helps families evaluate how a school’s founding story and stated values actually show up in daily life.
Asian American families can find a more tailored take on Maret’s admissions in our dedicated guide, which applies these fundamentals directly to Asian American applicants.
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