What we call education is the way we impart to children the best of human traditions and discoveries. For an educational program to be excellent, it must make the learning process a rich and subtle questioning of the world, not to mention a pleasure. Education should never be simply utilitarian. It must discover the new, be its own ethos, confront the quotidian with what was and what might be. Education at its best creates a quality of mind that confronts and challenges the status quo.
Saint Ann’s School is not unusual in wanting to prepare children creatively and efficiently in the academic disciplines and the arts, and surely not unique in wanting students who demonstrate amply the necessary aptitude and motivation. What is out of the ordinary, we think, is our habit of giving students freedom to achieve, to value learning more than propriety, to trust the unadorned pleasures of learning, unassisted by point scores, prizes, rankings, and punishments.
We admit the talented. Those we admit, we joyfully label as talented. Behind all we do at Saint Ann’s is the theory that not only accelerated but qualitatively different methods of teaching must be developed and applied for the gifted.
And so we innovate. But to insure against strivings after wind or reinventions of the wheel, we measure ourselves by achievement. Extraordinary flexibility is matched with a constant and consonant emphasis on academic excellence. The School fosters a climate in which many can work together to realize the highest potential of each student with no compromise of individuality. Our program thus involves the child in as many activities as possible and this, in turn, brings the School together. We are a genuine community, operating six and often seven days a week, constantly reinvented as the members move from role to role, but made whole by a common commitment to each other and to creative intellectual effort. A unique choice of faculty, a unique concept of student freedom, and a no less unique mutuality of students and teachers are our premises.
At Saint Ann’s it is hard to distinguish curriculum from community. A curriculum is traditionally thought of as a sequence of concepts and details, assumed to be related to each other, and thought to be learnable in a given period. For us, however, the curriculum is pervasive: a vehicle for learning skills as well as facts; the medium of our friendship with children; a source of humor and poetry; a focus for activities across the disciplines and for formalisms from art to algebra. It is also a way for our students to reach us. As we share enthusiasm, it becomes our common ground, the center around which a group can be built, in the classroom and beyond it.
In our classrooms we believe that we should gear what we teach to the ability and achievement of individual children. Administrators are charged with making it possible, where appropriate and feasible, for any child to undertake work in subject areas ranging from basic reading to calculus and Chinese whenever the child’s individual talents and rate of progress demand it. The aim is to educate every child from the standpoint of where he/she is, not where age or grade says he/she should be.
Teachers at Saint Ann’s are chosen for strong intellectual interests and personal commitment to the education of our children. Whether they teach high school seniors or first graders, all faculty are qualified by literacy and love of children, and each of them is a specialist in — and a lover of — his/her subject. The School asks for academic excellence, free from dogmas or method. Teachers are offered the opportunity to communicate their enthusiasm, to use whatever methods they find practical, and to make their individual demands on the students. Our experience is that genuine respect cannot be commanded. It has to occur naturally. The leadership of the teachers, in the classroom and out, arises from their intellect and accomplishment. There is no other source of status here.
The growth and success of Saint Ann’s owes much to good fortune, favorable times, strong leadership, and a larger community receptive to the School’s basic philosophy that very bright children require unusual education. We offer our dreams to those who will share theirs with us. We offer them the knowledge that education is, in the last analysis, a celebration of life and that life is wondrous, ephemeral, and, for those reasons, sacred. We offer them a search for the partial revelations of culture, the transcendence of art. These are the only basics. On these there is no turning back.