Attic's High School Analysis

This week, the Attic’s high school was privileged to host Michelle Jones, President and Co-Founder of Portland, Oregon’s new progressive college, Wayfinding Academy. Although I could go on and on about this intriguing (and familiarly structured, for those of us here at the Attic!) school, what I want to focus on here is something Michelle told our kids. She left her position in traditional high education because, she said, she could envision an ideal college, and it looked different than that tradition. Alongside her colleagues and the students at Wayfinding Academy, she is now working to create that ideal.

Listening to Michelle speak about her ideal spurred me to look for others’ visions of ideal educational models, and I came across this
I had grown weary of the constraints typical of a traditional educational model: testing, excessive quantitative assessment of teacher productivity and student learning, and the Orwellian language of the system (students as “FTEs”, our learning goals as “course objectives”, and student growth as “measurable outcomes”). And I could no longer bear the tensions that my unreasonable workload created in my relationship with my family, nor the resentment that grades created in my relationships with my students. In my ideal classroom, I thought, everyone present would understand that learning is inherently valuable; that study happens not because there is a test to pass at some point in the future, but because our minds are curious; and that discussion and participation is essential not because there are “points” attached to it, but because it is through thoughtful engagement with other minds that our own minds stretch and develop. This is what I believed as a devotee of the liberal arts, as a thinker and writer and reader, as a life-long student and teacher. Why weren’t the educational institutions in which I had taught on board with that philosophy? Wasn’t my deep faith in those truths the reason I had begun teaching in the first place? And if I was alone in that faith, could I honestly keep teaching in a system that practiced education so wildly