JoyLess, Mind-Numbing, Soul-Killing….

Living in school is an essentially inferior, vulgar, imitative, second-rate human experience because this is the kind of ecological press that surrounds us both in and out of school…a living embodiment of the very shoddiness that pervades our general social experience…a rather faithful replica of the whole.

~James Macdonald

It’s Urgent!

Emergency!

Democratic Self-Understanding

Democratic Social Understanding

Subject MatterUnderstanding

John Goodlad’s body of work speaks clearly to the responsibility of schools and those who implement the work of schools to accomplish a two part mission: to both o introduce students to “the organized bodies of knowledge that discipline and enrich our dlives as citizens, workers, parents, and individual human beings,” as well as to “enculturat[e] the young in a social and political democracy.” At our small school in the Midwest, founded on Goodlad’s writing and work, we begin this process the moment a student walks through our doors.

to moral imagination

to transactional aesthetics

to systemic deliberation

to ethical fidelity

It’s what we always

do!

I just haven’t thought about it.

In Mission Hill School in Boston

A public pilot school originally founded by Deborah Meier

A member of the Coalition of Essential Schools

Maxine Greene

To use the intellect….

In the spirit of tiep hien….