A Website By Rebekah Williams

Today, I read some of Rita Kramer’s biography on Montessori and the philosophical roots of Montessori’s education for young children.  In tracing back Montessori’s focus on a sensorial-based education, Kramer introduced philosophical concepts of Rousseau, Froebel, Itard, and Seguin.  As I was reading about how Montessori developed her interest and method for young children, I was thinking about what it will take to “sensitize” young adults or adolescents from “at-risk” backgrounds to be healthy participants in today’s society.

I believe there are two very important pillars that should be stressed in today’s adolescent or secondary education, these pillars are environmentalism and communitarianism.  Each of these pillars have a set of principles that can be learned through observation and which applied to the education of young adults will teach social-responsibility, personal accountability, cultural-respect, care for the environment, teamwork, and interdependence.

Jane Jacobs, well-known for her environmental activism and interest in sustainable economics, emphasized the importance of applying the principles of ecology to economic development.  Developing on Jacobs approach, the principles of ecology can be applied to the education of adolescents, as there are key lessons that can be learned through an ecological, principle-based, education.

Similar to the application of environmental principles in education, we cannot separate the importance of community in the education of today’s young adults.  In Bowling Alone; The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam talks about the disintegration of neighborhoods and communities.  He ends his book by encouraging an increase in civic engagement and volunteerism.

I believe that an education employing civic engagement and volunteerism, based on neighborhood-revitalization and family-involvement, with a foundation in community-building principles, has the power to engage young people by focusing on what is important to them in their day-t0-day lives.  Many young people, locally and abroad, are excluded from a quality education because that education does not connect with the reality and community in which they live.

This week, I had dinner with a friend, Benjamin Breault, a teacher’s aid at the Faulk School in Buffalo.  Although Ben is currently working towards his Masters to teach social studies, he found himself in an English Language classroom, where he introduces the kids to literature with a strong social, cultural and geographic focus.

Ben is a passionate individual, always coming up with new approaches to teaching, and an avid traveler.  Through attendance at the National Conference for the Social Studies, Ben came across a unique opportunity to travel to Turkey with a group of social studies educators.  In Turkey, he went off on his own to experience the desert and ended up staying with an elderly man who’s home is in a mountain cave.

At dinner, I told Ben about my experience with this training, why I am taking the training, and my dreams to start a high school in Buffalo.  He insisted that I read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson.  Ben recently saw Greg Mortenson speak at that same social studies conference.  From what Ben was saying, Greg sounds like the kind of person we need educating.  He established schools in Pakistan (through a request of the Pakistani village elders), which focus on the education of young girls.  Mortenson’s commitment to children, peace, and social justice resonates with the type of educator Maria Montessori envisioned; the educator necessary for the reform of schools.

I’m excited to read the book.

In the winter of 1997, I participated in my first sweatlodge ceremony.  At the time, I was a freshman at the SUNY University at Buffalo.  I was studying English.  I spent days disenchanted with the ambitions of academia and career, and nights wandering Buffalo’s university neighborhood, philosophizing, and dreaming up a new world.

It was after the sweatlodge ceremony that I remember experiencing the  sense of wonder that Juan De Pascuale recalls in his article A Wonder Full Life.

De Pascuale wrote, “Wonder needs a sense of place to take root.  It unfolds when the familiar is noticed to be unique.”  In the days following my first sweatlodge experience, I wrote a poem in which I tried to communicate my experience of noticing the familiar as unique.  It was through the experience of the sweatlodge, of being so grounded – through that ceremony – in my skin, in my breath and with the people around me, that I became aware of the world in a different way.  In this poem I tried to communicate what De Pascuale described as “a deepening experience of everything around me.”

Connections

February 10, 1997

(in a creative writing class with Robert Creeley)

Breathe…

breathe in the world

for there is so much more, outside looking in, than inside looking out.

There is a comfort in the reality of the thump and bump of the heart.

As the clean, polluted air enters the lungs

the eyes take in the air of sight.

Be here now, be now here

where bodies rub and grind and pass energy on the street.

Here

the dishes clash and clang.

As mug is lifted to lips, steam fogs glasses and the mind is centered.

Now

I am where the wind whispers,

the trees welcome, and the fire chatters, conversing with the mumbling earth.

I am I

a simple, concrete, abstract, who is being – here – in this moment,

now knowledgeable of my place.

That night,

the heat summoned my insides 0ut, pushing impurities of future thoughts,

past deaths,

in to my breath and released,

took in,

released,

took in,

those bodies…

sweating, drooling, breathing, singing, rocking as one, in a serious delirium of understandable insanity.

There is a parallel to blackened tent, cramped bodies, open minds

- which is -

enlightened streets, movement, wandering eyes.

Life…

work for shelter and take and create angry, tensed muscles, hands unable to grasp life.