This is The Eureka Project, an occasional letter from me, James Mitchell, about creative writing, branding, and living. In case a one-month hiatus made you forget.
This school does not exist; but then, I do not have a daughter, so the chances of her getting in are either 0% or 100%, depending on how you look at it.
Where is this school? The school is in the world. By which I mean, the school is surrounded by things from the world, the real world: a forest, a field, bordered by mountains on one side and a beach on the other, under a canopy of visible stars so that my daughter never forgets where she is, and where where she is is. There is a lot of big weather; sunshine that lasts as long as a hockey game, but also thunder you can feel, that reminds everyone at the school how small they are, and how safe, because nature might be wild, but if we are careful, we can be on team nature.
The school has regular lunchbreaks, but sometimes the children cook. They learn the joy of making something themselves, and the magic of connecting with another by sharing with them. My daughter loves making stew. The way many hardedged and independent things go soft and intermingled, if you give them a little warmth and a little time.
Who teaches? Anyone that really needs to. The school of my daughter is a breathing stop for pilgrims and wanderers and wonderers, and they pause there to teach because they know they will also learn.
The first thing every child will learn, and the thing every teacher will rediscover, is that learning is worth the learning. Sometimes it’s for fun, yes, but sometimes a lesson makes the world look a little sharper, or it names something - wind, fog, loss - so that you can finally see it. They’ll spend a year learning what learning is.
Then they’ll learn the world. Not in subjects, for subjects are divisible and easy to reject as “too hard” and “not for me” or “pointless”. They’ll never learn that subjects exist, because maybe subjects never did exist until we invented them.
My daughter will only learn how to live:
But we’ve left out the most important thing: who’s learning at this school? Who is she with? Is there an entrance exam, a catchment area, a means test?
It must be for everyone. Rich, poor, and every persuasion - anything someone happens to be, deserves to exist. We all deserve each other, the best versions of each other, and this school, this world, is bigger than all of us.
That is the school I’d build for my daughter, for everyone. And I’d build it here.
References
“I dreamt in a dream I saw a city, invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the Earth. I dreamt it was the new city of friends.” - Walt Whitman, quoted in They Came To A City by JB Priestly.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas: a much more exciting take on this concept. Including: “It must be build not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions.”
That’s all for now. Take care everyone.