A Year at Mission Hill, a 10-part video series on a experimental Boston public school, is now complete, writes Sam Chaltain in (Extra)Ordinary People.
Mission Hill founder Deborah Meier believes “democracy rests on having respect for the judgment of ordinary people.”
We see a montage of children in various states of joy. We hear teachers sing the words of poet Kahlil Gibran at their school’s graduation ceremony (“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”). And we watch principal Ayla Gavins tell her staff she will refuse to administer new testing requirements under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.
“The freedom of teachers to make decisions about their classrooms and their lives is essential, ” Meier says. “The whole point of an education is to help you learn how to exercise judgment – and you can’t do that if the expert adults in your school are not allowed to exercise theirs.”
