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We view education as an opportunity to help children live life fully… Words from our mission. Some of you might be wondering, great, but how? With what tools? What kinds of measurement? And will it get my kid into Dartmouth? Not the point. The point is the kinds and qualities of experiences we provide that tap into children´s aesthetic and emotional worlds. It is about the development of sensibility. The recent Sant Jordi celebration, with its pageantry of dance and music, and cultural pride; the opening of the student art exhibit at the Gracia Arts Project last week with the gallery walls alive with the images student art work; the spontaneous expression of joy that cascaded out on the patio when nearly the entire elementary and middle school began dancing to a visiting jazz band. As educators, our vocabulary is dominated with concepts like critical intelligence, problem solving, collaborating, as signature qualities for the present and future work world. But what about the sense of wonder, the capacity for the spontaneous, the unlimited, boundless, generous, joy filled energy of imagination, self-expression and meaning making? What about those dispositions and habits of mind and being, that enrich the quality of our lives and our capacity to appreciate it? What are we doing to sustain it?

In my last letter, I shared an ominous and troubling tendency in many of our older students towards complacency and entitlement. This week I want to acknowledge the playfulness, hopefulness, goodness and gravity defying sense of happiness that so many possess. Our job (parents & teachers) is to inspire, cultivate, channel, and deepen these attributes. It is the life force that creates culture.

Lately I have been thinking about academic rigor. Something we could use more of. But even more so, what about academic vitality: the openness to explore, take risks, make connections, improvise, experiment with ideas and with materials? What about learning to live life fully? My answer and my hope is this: Watch the patio some morning, between the jump rope, four square, soccer, hand games, and touch tag games that kids invent. We would be wise to know that this is more than child’s play. It is also culture making, living fully at its most genuine, its most vital.