making bows...

Students need to find ways to cope under difficult circumstances. But schools should offer these opportunities in the first place. In this video you will find a young man who was driven by a compulsion to escape the pressures of the Korean school system, and learned from his outside the classroom activity to be a philosopher. It's just what Jean Jacques Rousseau said would happen. "Put a young man in a workshop, his hands will work to the benefit of his brain and he will become a philosopher while thinking himself only a craftsman." Larry, Thanks for the link.

Every seven years Clear Spring School goes through a process of re-accreditation and we are finalizing reports and preparing for a team of visiting educators to come in April. When Friedrich Froebel's school was visited and assessed in 1824, the inspector found:

"Self activity of mind is the first law of the institution; therefore the kind of instruction given there does not make the young mind a strong box into which as early as possible all kinds of coin of the most different values and coinage, such as are now current in the world, are stuffed; but slowly, continuously gradually and always inwardly, that is according to a connection founded upon the nature of the human mind, the instruction steadily goes on, without any tricks, from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, so well-adapted to the child and his needs that he goes as readily to his learning as to his play."

This is what we expect our visiting team to discover at the Clear Spring School.

Make, fix and create...