As we carve out a new path for our learning community, it is important to consider the stages of our journey. This blog is about making the effort to catalog our thoughts as we build something new. The questions I ask my students when they write about identity, others, location, and opinion are based on three simple perspectives: past, present, and future. In other words, “Where did you come from?” Where are you going?” and “Where do you want to go?”
As a school, a community, and individuals in transition, what we examine and how carefully we do so has to start with those basic questions. If we want to be intentional in our actions, we need to know what kind of ground is underfoot. If we want to offer commentary on our progress, there needs to be a record of where we’ve been. If we are to prove our vision is worth achieving, we need to show how we will see it come to fruition.
I’ve posted three quotes below from another school founder [we're all school founders now] named Helen Parkhurst. Before you jump to Google her name, I’d like you to pay attention to her words. Think about when you think they were said, if they were heeded, and what kind of school would spring from their philosophy.
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“Thought runs in a new direction. No longer does one think how to bring the matter, the information, to the child, but how to lead the child to find it for himself.* One thinks how to arouse and maintain that interest in dealing with a subject, so that work becomes a ‘breath and finer spirit.’”
“The true business of the school is not to chain the pupil to preconceived ideas, but to set him free to discover his own ideas and to help bring his powers upon the problem of learning… Let us think of the school as a place where community conditions prevail as they prevail in life itself.”
“Children who grow up with a joy in the work which interests them will be likely to find that interest useful to them in their later life. It is certain at all events, that our education which allows a child liberty to develop and time to think and plan must favour the expansion of all the good qualities innate in his personality.”
I’ll post more information about Parkhurst, her school, and what it looks like next, or you can Google it 
Write! Converse! Respond!
