I was in 2nd grade when I first learned about the demerit system. My teacher had a large wall poster covered in little pockets with students’ names on them. When someone acted out of line or committed an offense, the teacher would call them up to put a black mark in their pocket. Three strikes and you’re out.

I was called over to the demerit board once: strike one. I didn’t know what would happen when someone got three demerits, but I knew this: I was afraid. Very afraid. And embarrassed. My teacher used fear as an educational philosophy to keep us in line. Fear of the black mark.

Later on in my schooling, there was a big push for schools to get kids to read more, and the Book-It program was born. If you read a certain number of books you got a coupon for a free personal pan pizza. Those coupons were like gold. Going to the local Pizza Hut to redeem your coupon and eat pizza with friends was a really big deal. That program used the promise of a reward as an educational philosophy to get us to do what they wanted. Pizza and fun with friends.

Fast forward to graduate school and my teaching education. Courses in classroom management are a requirement in just about every education program. They seek to provide answers to the question of how to get students to do what you want them to do. “Don’t smile the first month” was an educational philosophy recommended to us during that first class in my masters degree program. The other behavior modification methods followed what I had experienced in my own growing up years: the promise of a reward (like pizza) and the fear of punishment (like the black mark) and so on.

While I was preparing for our weekly teacher’s meeting recently by reading Charlotte Mason’s A Philosophy of Education, it struck me: Mason did not train aspiring teachers in classroom management. She wrote, “In our Training College, the students [the teachers in training] are not taught how to stimulate attention, how to keep order, how to give marks, how to punish or even how to reward, how to manage a large class or a small school with children in different classes.”

By contrast, in my own graduate program—chock full of one educational philosophy after another—I spent a whole semester on the topic of classroom management and then had in-service trainings as follow-ups on a yearly basis. What was Mason’s secret?

She answered my question as I read further: “All these things come by nature in a school where the teachers know something of the capacities and requirements of children.”

That’s a very simple but profound statement. What exactly are the “capacities and requirements of children”? As parents, grandparents, teachers, and administrators, I’m confident we can all agree that their capacities are limitless.

“I am anxious to bring before teachers the fact that a child comes into their hands with a mind of amazing potentialities… To be born a human being is like coming into a very great estate; so much in the way of goodness, greatness, heroism, wisdom and knowledge possible to us all.”

And the requirements for children that she noted? Very simply, they require ideas. “Our business is to give children the great ideas of life, of religion, history, science; but it is the ideas we must give, clothed upon with facts as they occur, and must leave the child to deal with these as he chooses.”

Ambleside is unlike any other school in our area, and our educational philosophy is unlike any other in the entire world. We do not treat students as products, to be controlled with the technique du jour, but as persons, with an appetite for ideas and limitless potential within them.

Mason said that persons that go through life without recognizing the great potential within them “have no notion of how much they can do and feel, know and be, and so their lives turn out poor, narrow and disappointing.” It cannot be! Help us in this work to reveal to children what is possible to them and what they should work toward. And then, as Mason says, “some elevation of character throughout the nation should be manifest in a single generation.”

This is the education that the world needs right now.

Gratefully,

Krise Nowak, M.Ed.

Head of School

The Educational Philosophy the World Needs