October

Inspiring Greatness

“Come Out of the Cave”

October 12, 2012

Although this is not a complete transcript from the evening, they are the notes which Linda and Dean Forman referenced. To benefit the most from the Inspiring Greatness Seminars, attendance is strongly suggested. Thank you.

Thank you for taking time out of your very busy lives on a Friday evening, to come to our very first ever Inspiring Greatness seminar. Would you please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge

For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Millie Happoldt and I am the Dean of Academics. I’m incredibly thankful to be able to be here tonight to share this with you. The overall purpose of Inspiring Greatness is to serve as an educational opportunity for you to come to gather information about what really is John Adams Academy, in depth. We’re going to be learning so much about the Academy together. We’ll be focusing on The Seven Keys of Great Teaching, our Nine Core Values, the Classical Education Model, and we’ll be building bridges and links between the school and the home to best support the number one most important thing in the world, your children. That is the glimpse of what we’re doing.

We have materials provided here for you tonight:

A commonplace book
Blue folder for handouts
Pocket Constitution
Pocket cards with the Nine Core Values and Seven Keys to Great Teaching
Handout

I’m going to show you my commonplace book. All of our teachers have one of these. Each of your scholars over the course of their academic career at John Adams Academy will be filling many commonplace books.

Just briefly, the purpose of the commonplace book in our classical education model is to gather notes that are important to us. When we hear a quote for example, in our reading, or we come across information that we’d like to refer or go back to, a new fact, some of them might be vocabulary words, we collect them in our common place book. Your scholars use a commonplace book to help navigate through socratic seminars or discussions, to link curriculum.

Perhaps a science link if your young scholar is studying plants. In Kindergarten studying plants might look different than in the fourth grade Botany unit and then in the fourth grade Botany unit they’ll gather some ideas in their fourth grade commonplace book, then they may come across different plant “concepts” in their high school science experience with Mr. Turner. So there’s a constant source to go back to. They are connecting the spiralling of their education for those a-ha! moments, “Oh, I think I remember learning that before.” They will have something to go back to, it’s one of the purposes.

We’ll be going into more details in the nights to come.

Now I’d like to introduce Dean and Linda Forman.

Dean Forman-Founder

Introduction: A Classical Education

Thank you all for coming tonight! Many have expressed a desire to understand and to reinforce the principles and values taught here at John Adams Academy. Your understanding and participation are critical to the success of our vision to restore America’s heritage by developing servant-leaders who are great men and women of public and private virtue.

Mission Statement

The John Adams Academies are restoring America’s Heritage by
developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom for which our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes and
sacred honor.

It is absolutely impossible to convey in one hour, our journey of the past several years to open John Adams Academy, restore a classical education, impart what that is and what it looks like at JAA, and lead you “out of the cave” to a paradigm shift of educational understanding and inspired continued learning for yourselves to acquire the education you wish you had.

Our goal for the eight session outline is to introduce the foundation, principles, values, and methods and hopefully encourage each of you to move from introduction to scholarly study for yourselves to lead and inspire your own children on the journey to greatness. Only with this collaborative and determined effort can the vision of John Adams Academy be fulfilled.
It is imperative that you read A Thomas Jefferson Education. We are not a Thomas Jefferson Education (TJEd) school; however we have taken the true principles from Oliver DeMille’s book and adapted their application into a public school setting. By reading the book you will be enlightened and understand the principles and vocabulary that creates our culture here at John Adams Academy.

Why John Adams Academy: The Vision

Just before the passing of Thomas Jefferson he penned the epitaph to his headstone. It reads “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia”. If Jefferson were alive today he might change the order in which these are stated. Independence has been won. However, it is the implementation of widespread education that will maintain independence.

I would like to hand each of you this small pocket collection of the organic founding documents of our country. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for Parents to dissolve the educational bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the State, the separate and equal station to which the laws of California and of Nature’s God entitle them, a world class education, the opinions of the educational bureaucracy requires that we should declare the causes which impel us to the Separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all children are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of a great education. That to secure these rights schools are instituted among children deriving their just powers from parents of the children, that whenever any form of education becomes destructive to these ends it is the right of the parents to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new school laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their educational improvement and future happiness.

Prudence indeed will dictate that schools long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that parents are more disposed to suffer while no other choice exists, than to right themselves by abolishing the one size fits all to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of academic, economic and moral decline reduces them without freedom of choice it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such schools and provide new teachers and schools for their future success. I will now state our complaints which brought on this academy.

About twelve years ago I was at home when my daughter came home with a school newspaper. The headline read; “Let’s Talk About Sex”. As I read further this article went into graphic details. I was shocked to think about what my daughter was being taught. I sent out an e-mail to several parents asking their experience with the high school. Over 15 parents responded with such things as drama being performed “for mature audiences only”; dress and grooming standards that were untethered to any standard of decency, swearing being allowed in the classroom, reading lists requiring parental permission, female chair dancing at assemblies, releasing young girls during school to go off campus for abortions without parental consent and school sponsored dances where the chaperoning was slack. I thought to myself, is this what schools have become?

At the time one of my friends wrote the following to the principal. “We can take loving care to build a staircase. It can be a labor that absorbs us, and is extremely satisfying to our soul. Our workmanship can be the finest possible. It can be admired far and wide for the quality of the design and the elegance of its structure. But when we ascend the staircase, does it take us where we want to go? Or did we build it to take us to a room we would not want to visit very often? Your journalism students are clearly very talented, but is that talent being channeled carefully? Will it take them where they want to be someday?”

So here is my question for you today. Where should education lead us? Will the educational system you see out in our community take our children to where they want to be? Why John Adams Academy? My children are almost grown. I should be playing golf, tennis, traveling and enjoying toys. What am I thinking?

Well my life changed dramatically in the Spring of 2000 at a Face to Face with Greatness Seminar. We read a book many of you have now read, A Thomas Jefferson Education. I decided, along with my wife Linda to metaphorically do as Gandhi when he encouraged Indians to become economically self-reliant by spinning their own cloth by returning our home to similar organic roots of education.

We decided to give up frivolous TV and other forms of entertainment that were limiting our freedom and that of our children. I found the artificial stimulus offered in many schools with multiple choice tests, mindless entertainment, and constant text messaging stifling in many ways. It was my rendezvous with the greatest people/minds that have ever lived. Along the way I met Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Luther, Michelangelo, Montesquieu, Locke, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and many others.

Some of you may be thinking as I did, "Isn’t a classic book one that sounds good, but you never actually read it?" However, as I did this study I noticed I naturally started to bring these thinkers and heroes to my children in the car, on vacations, at the dinner table, and read to them about these great people before bed each night. I was trying to do what the ancient Greeks called “Paideia” meaning education or instruction meant for a self-governed state of citizen leaders. In other words teaching them how to think and reason.

This educational journey has included seven years on two school boards and the pursuit of further education culminating in a Ph.D. I have also watched our nest at home shrink from six to three and soon to be two. I now have six grandchildren.

The preamble of the Constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There are seven principles here in the first paragraph of this document, I want to draw your attention to the last one. It is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. What greater gift could we bestow on our families, communities and country than that of an education in the pattern of the great thinkers and statesmen of the Western World? As I look in the faces of my grandchildren (these newest Americans) I asked myself what sort of a country will they inherit, and what will I tell them when they ask me one day, “Grandpa, what were you doing when America was going from first to the back of the pack educationally, economically, morally and ethically?

In the words of Abigail Adams:

“These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out the great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and statesman.”

Abraham Lincoln is credited to have said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next”. Do you like the philosophy of government in our generation? I don’t know about you, but with few exceptions I am not impressed with who I see leading our government or business. What difference can classically trained servant-leaders make who have been mentored by the greatest men and women who ever lived?

I return now to the question of my friend. What room do you hope to find at the end of your staircase of education; of life? What do you want to leave to your posterity; to your country? Where will you find it?

I believe a classical leadership education as offered by John Adams Academy for the next generation may be the only hope that a nation conceived in liberty….shall not perish from the earth, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Please turn to the end of the Declaration of Independence. Notice how they signed it with their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. In the language of the time this is called public virtue or putting the interest of others above self. Plato and Aristotle taught that citizenship carries the responsibility, virtuous actions or the elevation of community above self.

As James Madison said, "Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men, so that we do not depend upon their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.” (Quoted in Jonathan Elliott, ed., The debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 5 vols, ;Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1901] 3:536-37emphasis added.)

You may have wondered why the term servant-leader. Now you know. Classics are the heart, and virtue is the soul of John Adams Academy. We’re trying to give you some of our best tips that we’ve learned over the years as to how to mentor great kids that will change the world. That’s our goal.

So, at this point, I’d like to have my wife, come up. She’s been the inspiration behind much of this.

Linda Forman

Why Classical Education: The Method

This philosophy and system of education has produced the greatest leaders, statesmen, creators, and thinkers of the past 2000 years. And to be effective it must be a family life-style. The classical method was born in ancient Greece and Rome, and by the 16th century, it was used throughout the Western world. This system educated most of America’s founding fathers as well as the world’s philosophers, scientists and leaders between the 10th and 19th centuries. Those who assume that methods used for millennia can be dismissed within a generation forget that time is the best laboratory, especially regarding human behavior.

For education to be effective, it must go beyond conveying fact. Truly effective education cultivates thinking and articulate students who are able to develop facts into arguments and convey those arguments clearly and persuasively.

The influence of “progressive” teaching methods and the oversimplification of textbooks have made it difficult (I would say nearly impossible) for students to acquire the mental discipline that traditional instruction methods once cultivated. The classics have been replaced with dry text books; mentors replaced with teachers that have very little time for their students, and so, I think one of the most disturbing results has been, young adults have been replaced with teenagers.

The classical lifestyle develops independent learning skills on the foundation of language, logic, and tangible fact focused on:

How to think
Leadership
Self-reliance
Patriotism
Courage
Creativity
Values
Character
Responsibility
Fortitude
And how to inspire

Using:

Classical literature/art/music
Mentorships
Simulations
American history and government
Service and industry
Public speaking and writing
Self-government and independent thinking

Just to name a few.

Beyond subject matter, classical education develops those skills that are essential in higher education and throughout life, independent scholarship, critical thinking, logical analysis, and a love for learning. Do you still have a love for learning? Was it obliterated in the mainstream system?

Classical education was the norm 100 years ago because it worked! It continues to work because even though we are NOT teaching to the test the test scores will follow.

API: Academic Performance Index. Determined by converting into points a student’s scores on the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) examination and the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE), and then averaging all student scores. School scores range from 200 (low) to 1,000 (high) and are used to assess performance.

John Adams Academy 2011-2012 API = 899

When you step on to campus, the culture of which we strive for at John Adams Academy should be felt immediately as a place of intense focus and intellect. The uniform serves as a symbol of the serious nature of what goes on within the classrooms.

The uniform is simplicity, not complexity. We want our scholars to define themselves by their knowledge and great ideas and the ability to articulate those in written and oral argument with vast vocabularies because it is who they have BECOME. They will have no need to define themselves as so much of this generation by their tattoos, piercings, or as some have suggested for our uniforms, Peter Pan collars. This isn’t what we are about! We are not about the entertaining, the crayons, the projects, but about the hard work of helping our scholars become great men and women of virtue. They do this by accomplishing hard things. And we will push them to do so. They will use the lessons of the past to make decisions for the present. They will read great literature of heroes that they might have the vision of Julius Caesar and moral rectitude of George Washington. Truly we are doing something counter-cultural. But this is not an easy place to be a scholar; therefore it is not an easy place to be a parent.

Core Values and Keys of Great Teaching:

In the next eight months we will develop understanding of our Nine Core Values and the Seven Keys to Great Teaching. All decisions, teaching, discipline, and planning is based on the foundation of our Nine Core Values.

Core Values

John Adams Academy is preparing future leaders and statesmen through principle-based education. Our core values include:

·         Appreciation of our national heritage
·         Public and private virtue
·         Emphasis on mentors and classics
·         Student-empowered learning
·         Fostering creativity and entrepreneurial spirit
·         High standards of academic excellence
·         Modeling what we teach
·         Abundance mentality
·         Maintaining a culture of greatness

These values should apply in your homes as well as here at school.

Our staff development regularly reviews the Seven Keys to Great Teaching for planning and instruction: (DeMille)

·         Classics, not Textbooks
·         Mentors, not Professors
·         Inspire, [then] require
·         Structure Time, not Content
·         Quality, not Conformity
·         Simplicity, not Complexity
·         You, not Them

These values and keys are conveyed as we study classics (in all forms), subject ourselves to mentors of high moral character, model excellence, apply knowledge in real-life opportunities, and discover our own special excellence giving meaning and direction to our lives.

The superstar teacher, Socrates, at the very outset of Plato’s The Republic, makes a point about the process of education that is all important for us here at John Adams Academy. He says to Polemarchus, "Isn’t it true that each individual is unique?" And Polemarchus says, "Yes." Socrates says, further, "Isn’t it true, Polemarchus, that when we view humanity at its best, we can see that each individual has within herself or himself a special excellence, a gift?" (What Socrates will call the quality of arête.) Arête means, in Greek, a special excellence within the individual that defines that particular person.

Socrates says that the purpose of education, therefore, is to elicit that particular quality from individuals, to discern that within the student and develop it. That is the definition of education that we want.

Etymology:

Education: Educere (Latin) e = out + ducere to lead. To draw out what is already there--To cause to be expressed

Training: Trahere (Latin) = To pull in a straight line to cause to follow precisely.

Training creates wealth, Education creates freedom!

What is the purpose of the teacher, (Arete) Socrates asks. It is to elicit, to bring out, that quality of mind and behavior that defines the individual, which tells the individual whether and when he or she is at their best; so that that particular person, then, throughout life, can find and know that quality, and have it reinforced.

It is an important point in The Republic, the concept of the special excellence within each individual, and how the state (John Adams Academy) must discern that excellence, nurture it, and nourish it; finally to produce a good society. It is a good society because each individual is good; each individual has achieved, for herself or himself, what she or he can do best. The society then uses that quality of excellence. The state is a moral state, precisely because it elicits that moral quality of excellence within each individual. That’s Socrates’ argument.

That is the process which is the ideal here at John Adams Academy; drawing out the best of the individual. The Socratic Method is precisely that. We look to that model.
We must ask ourselves:

1) What am I meant to do?
2) Why was I meant to do it?
3) How am I going to achieve it?

Knowing the answers to these questions allows us to make a difference in the world and contribute to matters greater than self. I’m surprised how many people have asked Dean and I what’s in it for us, meaning the opening of the school. No one would go through these past few years if they were only concerned with what was in it for them!

To read further about our methods I refer you to the final pages of our document.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

Continuing in Plato’s Republic: Socrates is talking to a young follower of his, named Glaucon, and is telling him this fable to illustrate what it’s like to be a philosopher – a lover of wisdom. Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. (as a few parents have felt after looking at John Adams Academy but enrolling their children in a traditional school because it looks scary here, not what they’re used to.) But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! Once you’ve tasted the truth, you won’t ever want to go back to being ignorant. Dean and I have been moving down this path of understanding for 10-15 years and now that our last child is off to college we are just beginning to feel like we’re getting it!

In the allegory Plato describes metaphorically the predicament in which mankind finds itself, the question of who should rule, and proposes a solution to that question that entails discipline and rigorous education. As I share the allegory, think of all your previous concepts about education, your own or your child’s.

Now Socrates says this:

“Here, my friends, is a parable; a parable to illustrate the degrees in which our nature may be enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light, and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see only what is in front of them because the chains will not let them turn their heads. It’s a strange picture, and a strange sort of prisoners. Like ourselves, though, for in the first place, prisoners so confined would have seen really nothing of substantial value of themselves or of one another, except the shadows thrown by the firelight on the wall of the cave facing them. Isn’t that true, Glaucon.”

Glaucon says yes, he grasps it. Do we?

Video: Plato's Allegory of the Cave in 60 Seconds

Picture the scene and I’ll ask some rhetorical questions.

· What is like the cave in our world?

-There are prisoners that live chained and uneducated in a cave.
· What sorts of things shackle the mind? (we had parents who felt we couldn’t be a real

school without a play structure!)

-Socrates asks if it isn’t reasonable that for the prisoners the shadows are truth.
·         Has what you believed as real changed?
·         Who has the power to shape your ideas and beliefs?
·         Is that good or bad?

-We wonder how the prisoners would respond if they were released from their bonds and cured of their ignorance.
·         Is it likely the prisoners want to leave the cave? (we interviewed perspective teachers who     couldn’t make that leap and went back to their “safe” job.)
·         Is reality important even if it is unpleasant? Like lots of homework, long days, …where’s

the extracurricular activities….that’s what school looks like….we must have those things!

-If one is forcibly dragged into the sunlight wouldn’t he be pained and irritated?

-And further wouldn’t he require additional time to have his eyes adjust to the sun, (something that changes the way we think – truth, knowledge, certainty)? Confusion or lack of clarity may be an indication that one is on the verge of insight or enlightenment. We hope, actually, that each of you right now is confused or have been confused and have since found your way through the rough path as you have prepared to be part of John Adams Academy.

-Socrates then asked Glaucon to ponder a series of questions and consider the condition of this now freed and educated man.
· How would he relate to the prisoners still in the cave and they to him? Did any of you

have friends or family that asked you what the heck you were doing putting your children

here in a new “experiment?” Many of our teachers got that from other peers.

-Recalling his first home and what passed for wisdom there, would not the freed man consider himself happy and his former fellow prisoners pitiable as well as skeptical?

-Faced with that threat Socrates concludes they would want to kill him and that is precisely what they did to Socrates. Socrates managed to get out. He came back again, and they gave him hemlock in 399 B.C. As our scholars become a model of greatness and our test scores validate our methods I don’t think we’ll need to worry about hemlock or the political equivalent.

-The prisoner learns that education can only occur when freed from the chains that bind him and forced to turn to the light and forced to accept things as they truly are rather than as one perceives them.

-Ultimately, Socrates uses the Allegory as his means of justifying his assertion that only the well-educated, the virtuous, the philosophers are suited to fulfill the larger purpose outlined in The Republic. To be rulers of his utopian city – the Kallipolis.

-So I think Plato is saying the fundamental purpose of education is not to instill knowledge but to change people’s behavior and desires.

What do they mean for you?
•Dark Cave
•Chained people
•Raised walls
•Shadow
•Chains
•Fire
•Rocky ascent
•Light of outer world (sun)
•Dazzling of eyes going out
•Dazzling of eyes going back in
•Persons who leave the cave
•Persons who return to the cave

-By changing their behavior and desires Plato argues people can reverse their tendency and preference to pursue what they incorrectly believe to be happiness and instead seek true happiness – the pursuit of virtue and reason.

Some conclusions:

- It is an “aristocracy of knowledge” this knowledge that moves us to wisdom (a change). Dean asked only one evaluation question of our teachers at the end of last year… “Have you been changed? Have your students been changed? This is the key to family, financial, business, spiritual, emotional and social success.

-Anyone who remains in the cave regardless of what that person observes there can never be “truly virtuous.” Virtue is fulfilling what you were made to do.

-For the person living outside the cave the intellectual life and the moral life are one.

-But ultimately Plato says the educated must return to the cave and act there to free those that remain for it is among them that the future rulers shall emerge.

-He asserts that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to student; rather Plato espouses an approach that involves directing student’s minds toward discovering for themselves what is true, real and important. (John Adams Academy philosophy)

Family Discussion: If we had another hour I would break you all up into small groups and develop a Socratic dialogue about the questions that I have put into your handout. But as I stated in the beginning we are introducing, and now you must go and educate yourself. Share the cave allegory with your children. We have also included the complete dialogue in your handout. The allegory is a great place to start the classics, because it forces you to ask the important questions. Use the questions we’ve included to develop dialogue around your dinner table. An allegory is wonderful because it can have so many meanings and interpretations. We will leave time next month for you to share your family’s experience with the allegory.

Education’s purpose is to elevate us from false appearances (self-deception), to things as they are (nature), to things as they may ideally be (correct forms).

So, in order to be educated, we must turn away from misconceptions and achieve personal transformation by coming to understand things more nearly as they are. This can be a painful process. You must personally answer these questions:

What has “The Allegory of the Cave” helped you to understand about yourself?
Is Plato’s allegory the story of your own education? Or will it be?
Are you arranging the shadows on the wall? Or are you striving toward the light?

The 7th Key! You Not Them! The most important thing you can do for your child’s education is to educate yourself!

I am a visual learner, and though I don’t necessarily adhere to every idea Plato puts forth I hope by using Plato’s allegory you now have a visual image to put into perspective your journey here at John Adams Academy. It probably will be painful. It most definitely will be a lot of work. If it isn’t, you’re not doing it right! But I know through personal experience that the rewards for your scholars and mostly yourselves will be amazing.

Dean and I are still toiling up the path, but as we ask ourselves the hard questions, challenge self and move up the rocky ascent to enlightenment we will be prepared to help our scholars on their path to education, learning and ultimately. That is what John Adams Academy is about, for all of us, parents, teachers and scholars, finding our special excellence and becoming what we were meant to be.

(Works Cited in original “Come Out of the Cave” document)