Duke School was established in 1947 as a lab school for the benefit of students in the departments of psychology and education at Duke University. Duke School became independent of Duke in 1984 when a group of parents made it a nonprofit organization with the support and assistance of Terry Sanford, then president of Duke and the previous governor of North Carolina. Today, Duke School is recognized as a national leader in project-based education and design thinking. The school believes students come to school with a great deal of prior knowledge and curiosity and that they learn best when teachers build on this curiosity by helping them pose real questions about the world around them and subsequently guiding them to conduct in-depth investigations to answer those questions.