A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be. –Abraham Maslow
In The Education of Man, Frederick Froebel wrote that “… every human being has indeed, but one thought peculiarly and predominantly his own, the fundamental thought, as it were, of his whole being, the keynote of his life symphony, a thought which he simply seeks to express and render clear with the help of a thousand other thoughts, with the help of all he does.”
My understanding of this assertion in practice meant that if I, as a teacher, provided a wealth of mediums and skills through which students could express their thought, learning would be personally meaningful and ultimately useful.
A dream? Not possible? Not practical?
At The Prospect School in North Bennington, VT, we supported each child with opportunities to explore individual and collective thought, ideas, meaning. This meant ongoing close observations and listening in our classrooms and in collaborative discussions around students, their work, their expressions of thought.
We met to look at one child in depth according to six categories: the child’s stance in the world; the child’s emotional tenor; the child’s mode of relationship to other children and to adults; the child’s activities and interests; the child’s involvement in formal learning; the child’s greatest strengths and areas of greatest vulnerability.
Teachers kept detailed weekly records of each student to inform these presentations with accurate information. The conversations followed a specific structure that provided discipline in terms of respecting the child and his/her family as well as each other’s opportunity to speak. We also looked at issues and student work with the same sort of structure on a weekly basis. At least once a year, we interviewed each teacher with specific questions to get a full description of curriculum she had developed for her classroom.
We survived on a bare bones budget, usually with even less than I see in the most minimally supplied schools today. We used scrap paper donated from businesses and from our own office for the children’s drawing, which they did throughout the day. We had no textbooks. Our school “library” was an odd assortment of donated books along the walls of an entry room; classroom books came from long-term loans from the regional library that we visited a couple times during the year.
We didn’t feel deprived.
The minimal state of materials was not reflected in the richness of the curriculum. Drawing from children’s interests and questions, teachers developed multifaceted opportunities for inquiry and discovery. The building was filled with exploration, discovery and activity. The human imagination was the basic material for instruction.
Adults explored the most profound questions of meaning in our lives through our work with children and in conversations around issues and topics.
We were teachers who must teach and by teach we understood we also meant explore and discover what it means to be a human being.
Our souls and our lives were continuously engaged and enriched.
For more details about education at The Prospect School based in deeply seeing students:
Shared Territory:
Understanding Children’s Writing as Works
by Margaret Himley
Chapter 1 [Part 1, pp. 17-32]
The Study of Works:
A Phenomenological Approach
to Understanding Children
as Thinkers and Learners
(Coauthor: Patricia F. Carini)
https://files.nyu.edu/gmp1/public/him17.htm