Dear LREI Community,
Happy New Year! I hope all is well and that your family found time to rest and rejuvenate over the past two weeks. While we all enjoy a break, it was a treat to welcome the students back after their time away.
As a school, we really think about New Year’s Resolutions in terms of school years – beginning in September rather than in January. That said, we should always avail ourselves of opportunities to reflect on our work and to plan for future growth. When speaking of growth at school we are focused on the intersection of students, teachers, and program. These are conversations that happen in divisional faculty meetings and departmental meetings and the program is typically the topic of our weekly principal’s meetings. Sometimes the growth in the program is incremental, you will see it and experience it over time, and sometimes it is more immediate. We are a restless place – we are always looking for ways to move ahead. As Agnes De Lima wrote in the preface to her 1942 book, The Little Red School House:
During this period (since the founding of the school) progressive practice has been greatly modified and changed. It has been deepened and broadened by the newer findings of psychology and psychiatry; it has been given direction by new light thrown on physiological growth and development; it has been rendered more efficient through the advance of teaching techniques, especially in what are known as the “tool subjects”; it has been strengthened through the growing popular awareness that the principles it stands for and the methods it applies are closely allied to those of a democratic society.
All to say that reflection and growth have always been part of the school’s academic program and always will be, as we strive to ever more effectively meet our mission.
As we enter 2024 and rush ever nearer towards the presidential election and as we continue to navigate challenges to our LREI community and our larger municipal, national, and international communities it seems as important as ever to think about how we learn, speak, and work together. This goal is also top of mind and is another place where we can never be “good enough.”
With all that we are working to accomplish with your children, we need to make sure that they continue to hear and experience the need to honor the dignity of all people. As is age-appropriate they need to learn about how the dignity of individuals and groups have been attacked and questioned and how this continues to happen. As we see the ease with which the national conversation borrows language historically used to justify antisemitism and genocide and uses it to foster fear of present-day migrants, we have work to do. In a time of terrorism and war and impending famine, we have work to do.
Our work will involve many lessons and projects that are currently part of the program. It will require us to consider areas where more is needed – a more specific and targeted focus and an acknowledgment that lessons about bias towards one group of people also teach us about bias towards others and all. We must get better at how we teach students to listen to others, to respect values different from their own, and to keep equity and care at the center.
That is a lot. In essence, we need to stay true to LREI’s heritage and align our program with the best practices of progressive education and with those “methods” that “are closely allied to those of a democratic society.”
Here is to joining together to hope for and to work towards a peaceful and healthy 2024,
