Our Commitment to Our School and to the Education It Provides
by Stephen Keith Sagarin, for the Faculty, July 2006 - 20 Oct 2006

At our end-of-year faculty meetings, we discussed our commitment to our school and to the education it provides. Each teacher, in turn, spoke about his or her view of the question: Why are we doing this? We believe these notes are worth recording and passing along to our community.

Education is a humanizing process. Too much in our culture is distancing, alienating, and dehumanizing. We aim to overcome these forces as well as we can through teaching adolescents directly, honestly, and authentically.

The logic of overburdening students with workólife is hard so school should be hardóis flawed. Quality is at least as important as quantity. Pushing students to specialize too soon, to pretend to learning that is not really their own, is a kind of soul-torture against which we strive.

Among the chief alienating influences that threaten teens, too, are the temptation of drug and alcohol experimentation; this explains, in part, the seriousness with which we take our drug and alcohol policies.

Another powerful but unhealthy influence on teens is the wish to be anonymous. We provide school as familyóoccasional strife, but love, concern, and support. No one falls between the cracks; there are none.
∑ To be human is fundamentally and inherently to be creative. Creativity is not an enhancement to a curriculum, it is the core of any subject, science, math, art, or any other.

Cognition, affect, and action or behavior all unite in creative endeavor. This is why we aim to teach creatively and why we balance academics with practical, fine and performing arts.

Creativity involves choice and decision-making, and in the end derives from free endeavor. Freedomófreedom of thinking, of action, and of feelingóis our goal.

To attain this, our goals for our students include that they learn to be trustworthy, enthusiastic and responsible. We aim to develop these qualities in ourselves in order that our students may grow into them as healthy individuals.

To wish to approach the world creatively, students must find it meaningful. We, as teachers, must strive to show its meaning, to demonstrate the inter-connectedness of the parts of the world, to show paths to meaning and interpretation, to develop, as Owen Barfield put it, a ìscience of meaning.î We aim to show matter and spirit united, as one, as an inner and an outer manifestation of one world.

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