A Thought Experiment
Is it just possible, that if you spent most of your daytime hours for ten solid years of your young life sitting in one place, listening to someone feed you information and instructions and reacting to bells for direction, that for the following thirty or forty or seventy years, you could expect that to be the 'way' that things are?
And is it just possible that if you spent most of your daytime hours for ten solid years of your young life moving around, getting general direction from which you are tasked with organizing and completing projects, helping your peers and younger acquaintances, where 'work' is not largely defined as the thing that you have to do in order to get stuff that everyone else has but where work is simply an integral part of your life, the part that is called learning which can happen all of the time everywhere you are in everything that you do, that for the rest of your life, you might just expect that to be the 'way' that things are?
These are theoretical questions. Just like stuff at the atomic level, it is not exactly possible to know everything about every single component of what we commonly call society and most likely, just as with the Heisenberg principle in experimentation, once you start to observe anything, you begin to effect the outcome, so there is undoubtedly no specific scientific answer to that theoretical question. Basically, you need to use your imagination. Go ahead. Give it some free unbiased thought.
Apparently, the things that we are most conditioned by are the things that we appear to forget the most about. Do you think about the process involved each time you raise a spoon of soup to your lips? Do you think about the process involved when you use chopsticks? If you are an adult and you work/associate/interact with other people on a daily basis you probably have some life experience that tells you which of the two scenario's described above is a closer representation of life as you know it. Or life as you imagine it could be. Does that make sense?
This is not a test, there is no right or wrong answer, just a spectrum of possibilities from which you can choose. In order to exercise the power of choice however, you first need to be aware that there are choices. This thought experiment is simply a mechanism for creating awareness, not a stamp for assigning value judgments. That is one part of what the Charter School concept embodies, providing access to choice. Hey, that sounds like a Montessori concept!
That is the essence of what you will find in the Upper Elementary classroom. Action, centered around a definition for the word work which breaks with 'tradition'. Just like life itself, it does not come off in every single moment of time in an unblemished fashion but just like the air we breathe, that atmosphere is what vitalizes these students. Check back in a month, a year, twenty years from now, we believe that this makes sense and we will be here making sure it continues to be available as a possibility in this community.
