Educational Platform

    Schools are learning communities.  My educational platform begins with a fundamental belief in the incredible potential within each of us, adults and children alike.  All people are precious and valuable and possess great worth as human beings.  The environment, then, should allow for individual differences and needs in order to provide the maximum possible benefit to all.  Although this may sound somewhat existential, experience has taught me that we also need direction, leadership and standards.  Kindness, respect, citizenship, responsibility, cooperation, and integrity are powerful ideals our culture desperately needs.  As educators, we have a responsibility to model and transmit essential cultural, behavioral and academic skills.

    My philosophy of education is experimental is nature.  Learning occurs when we process what is happening in the world around us and make some kind of judgment about what this 'happening' means.  Throughout life, we acquire more experience and knowledge while integrating, extending, refining, and using this knowledge to explain and understand the world.  Some things that we learn in life we set out to learn.  At times, we learn by trial and error.  Other times we learn because information is immediately necessary.  Ideally we should learn many things because they are fun, interesting and relevant.  Unfortunately, we all learn some things because they are painful.  But regardless of the cause or motivation for our learning, we continue (hopefully!) to experience and experiment, judge and adjust intentionally or unintentionally throughout our lives.

    Within this view, a school's contribution to this learning process is not 'perfecting' people or getting them to some predetermined step on the developmental ladder.  Standards aside, none of us are capable of making someone else do anything or become someone they are not.   Rather, our contribution as educators is to encourage, direct, enable and facilitate the varied processes which will continue in an individual and fluid manner throughout life.  A school's primary goal must be to provide a secure environment for all members of the learning community where errors are seen as simply a means to the end, learning, and where growth occurs because we take risks within that secure environment.