Square Pegs, Solutions, Part 3

“The recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them.”, A.S. Neil said on page 5 in his 1960 seminal book, Summerhill. This is true enough for our youngest square pegs, but it hits the center of the bull’s eye for our adolescents. Indeed, angry teenagers forced to accept academic work behave through their madness, as we have seen. Even placed in a special education class or transferred into another school, they continue to sabotage their own success. Thus, placing these angry youngsters directly into the academics of the scholastic program to be highlighted in this and the next article, which means to take bright, troubled adolescents through a combined high school and junior college experience with a diploma and an Associate‘s degree earned at the same time, without providing a time for healing, of taking off the pressure, would set these youngsters and the scholastic program itself for sure failure. These older children, like their younger brothers and sisters, need a time to reset their emotional and academic readiness. A mixed age, responsibility based outdoor education cooperative community program for age’s 12 and up would through team, trust and community building in outdoor activities such as camping, hiking and backpacking, greatly resolve feelings of failure and self-loathing, replacing them with growing feelings of success and self-worth, and would replace the internalized, oppressive norms of the uniform school with those of an empowering, responsibility based cooperative community culture preparing them for successful secondary academic study. More, working closely with each youngster would offer staff opportunities to understand the unique emotional and learning characteristics of each student and would enable them to assist in any remedial work necessary.

Youngsters when feeling confident and empowered would, then, move themselves into an ungraded, responsibility based, cooperative community secondary education academic program. This program would integrate the received knowledge coming from written tradition, Western and Eastern, into six general studies areas, Science, History, Letters, Arts, Performance and Foreign Language Arts, and place each branch of knowledge into a cooperative learning lab setting for concentrated study in the desired area. Intellectual curiosity and the natural differences in abilities, interests and communication style would drive student engagement with the learned world and participation in the learning labs rather than that of uniform, mandated curriculum and subject class assignments. Inquiry Project Based Learning and Performance Assessment would be used exclusively by students to acquire interdisciplinary skills and content knowledge. Projects would be developed, implemented and evaluated in the learning labs where group members act together to achieve individual project objectives. All students would have instructional staff mentors thoroughly versed in the cooperative, responsibility based academics of the secondary education program and in the unique cognitive styles of the school’s population to assist in setting and achieving personal and academic goals. And like their younger colleagues these youngsters would in community with staff take governance responsibility deciding such policy as project performance standards, or requirements for graduating secondary education students into the early college, or community norms and methods dealing with their violation. Indeed, this healing and empowering secondary education academic community is desperately needed for our bright teenage square pegs.   Look for an Information/Organization Meeting date coming soon to establish here the primary program and the secondary education early college as real brick and mortar.