Recent Events

Celebrating New Beginnings: The Stories That Connect Us
July 20, 2008
construction site of the Academy's new Center

On Sunday, July 20, 2008, the Academy held a celebration and ceremony to acknowledge the groundbreaking for our new building. It had been approximately three and a half years since the groundbreaking for the Seton Castle Restoration Project and two years eight months since Seton Castle burned down.   A great deal of work by many people has brought us to this point of readiness to build again.  We felt it was time for a celebration for all who have befriended the Academy over these years.  Our theme was The Stories that Connect Us.

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The Learning Field Luncheon
December 4, 2007
La Posada de Santa Fe

Learning Field Luncheon

Aaron Stern at the Podium

On December 4, 2007, the Academy presented the Learning Field Luncheon, a fundraising event at La Posada de Santa Fe. The luncheon, attended by about 200 guests, included a brief film about the Academy’s mission and programs for re-imagining education. Academy founder, Aaron Stern, described the organization’s vision for culture change in learning and education (see below for transcript). Mary Ellen Petrisko and Patty Nagle, participants in the Academy’s two-year personal leadership training, Leading By Being, offered testimonials about the value of this transformative program. And John Wolf of Wolf Corp spoke about the importance of supporting the Academy’s crucial work.

Special thanks go to Prajna Foundation and to Swell Design for their gifts toward sponsoring the luncheon. And we are deeply grateful to the many guests who chose to make a contribution at the event!

Aaron’s Learning Field Luncheon Talk

I’m Aaron Stern - founder and President of the Academy for the Love of Learning.

I am deeply touched to see so many of you here in support of what I believe to be the important work of the Academy.

To begin, I ask you to turn and look gently for a few moments at the others at your table…one at a time – and imagine with me the possibility that each of us is endowed with basic goodness. Yes – of course, we have obscurations – but essentially, we are basically good. Please soften for a moment and allow yourself to see and be seen in that way.

………..

Can you see that possibility…past the obscurations to catch a glimpse of that in each other? Can you feel that in your self? That we are basically good?

I can – and I believe it with all of my heart.
And I believe that it is this that unites us as human beings on the deepest levels.

Original Blessing, as our friend, theologian, teacher and author Matthew Fox, called it, NOT Original Sin. Matt is sitting with us here today – the Academy’s first scholar in residence.

Now, can you imagine an education that rests upon and grows from such an understanding, specifically designed to draw forth from each human being that basic goodness and direct it into the world – for the simple sake of fulfilling one’s potential and destiny – without undue regard to its economic value?

I can.
I believe this is possible.
And urgently needed.

To state the obvious – we are in deep trouble as a culture, as a world culture. Each of us sitting here knows it. We feel it. We see it. We are barely able to hear our hearts anymore – to feel and recognize our deepest longings in the midst of the ever-present din of our world. The distractions have grown too loud. Things are moving too fast and grow faster still. In the words of the poet Yeats, in his prophetic poem The Second Coming, written in 1919, “the falcon cannot hear the falconer…the centre cannot hold…mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

I do not mean to dwell upon this, nor to engender fear, but rather, sobriety: to remind us that these are the waters in which we swim.

John Wolf

In the Lobby of the Montana Ballroom

In fact, in the midst of all this the Academy brings a vision of hope – of human possibility… of beauty – founded upon deep trust and belief in humanity, and an awareness that incremental change will likely not be sufficient -- but rather, bold, ‘out of the box’ initiatives are needed now. The Academy is one such initiative. And where better to start, than with learning and education – the very processes through which our views of the world are shaped – as Thoreau said, “the very atmosphere through which we see”?

I do believe we will make it to the other side of the looming earth changes, but as very different people in a very different world. The Academy is fashioning and practicing, now, the kinds of new educational views and methodologies that will serve us in that new world – methodologies, which, hopefully, will not lead us back to the same untenable cultural trance we are in now. In other words, I do believe that we can and will learn and transform. And by transform I refer to John Bennett’s definition:

“…we can be free from the past only when we have so changed ourselves as to be no longer the same person who performed the action. A dishonest man [sic] does not become honest simply by ceasing to act dishonestly, but by an inward change that makes it impossible for him to act dishonestly.”

Genesis/History

The Academy’s beginnings go back to my days in Chicago as the young Dean of the American Conservatory of Music, the 2nd oldest music conservatory in America. My job as Dean was to revivify the college’s bachelors, masters and doctoral programs.

Early on, I had a flash of insight that became the seed and passion that has been at the center of my life’s work ever since and is the inspiration for and lives at the pedagogical center of the Academy.

What I saw was quite simple, as such insights often are: that the same basic forces – namely, respect, reverence, curiosity and wonder – with which a composer goes about composing a piece of music could and should be the very same forces we apply to the education of children and to all people. A simple, but if it truly happened, radical idea.

A good composer’s work is not merely to “manufacture” a piece out of his her own ego or agenda. It’s something rather different. It’s to listen and hear deeply and clearly into a nascent musical idea – to find its nature and potential – and then carefully to serve that impulse, with great devotion.

For example, in composing his 5th symphony Beethoven came upon those famous 4 notes – ta ta ta taaa – and then, with great care, with reverence, curiosity, wonder and respect for musical history, never losing contact with the spirit of those 4 little notes, he set out to discover the nature of that nascent musical idea, and grow it into the complex, coherent inevitable universe that we now know as Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. It was somehow all there, but like a great detective his job was to find it and bring it into being. Those are compositions and composers we remember, the ones who know how to do that.

Now imagine a single child, maybe even the child inside each of you, with a unique nature and a potential destiny (4 little notes) and recall the word “education” for a moment (but in its true sense: its Latin root, Educare, means to lead or guide out). Imagine there is already present a seed or nature or rightest expression or destiny in that child to be led or guided out through the processes of learning and education.

And imagine that the world around that child stood in support with reverence, respect, curiosity and wonder for that to happen, as the world’s sacred task and responsibility.
If you can begin to see that and open into that possibility, you can begin to see what I saw.

Shouldn’t and couldn’t all of education be reoriented to work that way?

Why not apply as teachers, and cultivate within children, those specific forces of respect, reverence, curiosity and wonder, to bring forth this being into the world and make this the basis of all learning and education?

Learning then would become a sacred practice, and perhaps bring us closer to the Jeffersonian ideal of free human beings, our dignity and our potential thus revivifying the nearly lost spiritual destiny of our nation.

Sage Magdalene opens the Event

Sage Magdalene and Aaron Stern

To quote Yeats again: “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. “

Yet, as presently conceived, education is exactly the opposite. We pour and pour and pour and then we test and test and test to make sure all that we have poured in has taken.

So it was with this simple insight and question that I set out on my quest to change the equation. I began my life’s work some 30 years ago….

Back to our experiment for a moment: Look again at your table companions. Knowing already of their basic goodness, can you look at each of them with respect, reverence, curiosity and wonder, and ask: who is this human being? What is it they are here to bring? How can I support this? If you can do this, you may well be able to become a good teacher!

Can you imagine all teaching and learning being centered around this? I can -- and I do.

And so in my years at the Conservatory, I began to learn how to do this. I imagined and designed new curriculums that flowed from this seemingly simple idea. I developed a core faculty who experienced and understood this approach. And over time, my work won the support of major foundations, including the then newly formed MacArthur Foundation.

Then, in 1980 my work magically led me to the doorstep of the beloved musician and teacher, Leonard Bernstein, who understood immediately what I was exploring and joined with me in the last decade of his life to help imagine and conceive the Academy. Lenny died in 1990. The Academy became his own great hope for humanity at the end of his life.

In fact it was Lenny who named it, calling me one night at 3:00AM to say, “HEY! I got it! I know what to call our…thing! It’s the Academy for the Love of Learning – you know – ALL!”
“How pretentious!” I responded.
And he said – “Yea! That’s because YOU didn’t think of it!” In the end it was exactly the right name…

From Lenny I learned much about reverence, respect, curiosity, and wonder, and of course, about love. I can feel him here with me today.

After his death, I continued working on the Academy, developing, experimenting with and refining its work in many settings, peripatetically. Then, during 1997 and 1998 I met regularly in retreat format with a circle of dear friends and supporters, some here today, who understood and reflected with me upon the methods and intent of the work, and the Academy was formally incorporated at the end of 1998. We began our first programming in 1999.

At the heart of the Academy is a belief that if we can take the lid off learning, if we can somehow trust ourselves to liberate and support the natural human desire to learn – and keep it connected directly to fulfilling that nascent seed – then the destiny of each human being (our hearts, our basic goodness, our dignity) will come forth into the world and prevail. And we will feel a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. That is at the core of the work of the Academy and is our deepest intent: the liberation of our hearts, through learning.

Conversation over Lunch

Matthew Fox (Center) with Guests

Of course we would still have challenges in such a world. There will always be challenges, but of a different nature. We will be living in more direct alignment with our deepest longings and purpose, our spiritual nature, in an environment that welcomes and supports our emergent life force (our gifts and inclinations and our hearts), rather than frustrating them by co-opting and confusing them with other agendas, whether political or economic.

Imagine all of learning surrounded by love, connection and invitation – coherence with our natures – rather than fear and alienation (and testing, testing, testing). Instead of frustration, anger and reaction, imagine coherence, a sense of deep purpose and wellbeing: the re-birth of wonder. Imagine each human being coming closer to reaching their potential, and then collectively, our humanity – our human being-ness itself approaching its potential.

Crazy idea or not so crazy?

And anyway, what’s the alternative? What we have now?
As Al Gore said in his film Inconvenient Truth, “pot of gold… or the planet?”

Surely, we can and must come much closer to this ideal.

Educator and writer, Jonathan Kozol, was recently here in Santa Fe giving a talk. What he said was often heartbreaking – shattering. When citing research data about teachers, to paraphrase, he said:

Teachers do not leave the system because of the dangerous neighborhoods, lack of parent interest, or difficulty with students behaviors. These young teachers are too fine to resort to that sort of scapegoating. Rather, they are leaving because of the “maniacal testing obsession.”

Mr. Kozol went on to report on business slogans posted in first grade inner city classrooms. He saw mission statements such as,  “Produce future workers who will sharpen the competitive edge in the global marketplace.” (This, by the way, is quite similar to the New Mexico Department of Education mission statement.) Terms used for children and education include: future economic units, value-added children, drill and kill. Business curriculums are appearing in grade school. Testing occurs in Kindergarten classrooms to prepare kids for third grade bubble tests. These kids can’t hold pencils yet, but teachers aren’t allowed to help at all. Under these conditions kids wet their pants; they throw up.  They are terrified. We wonder what cruel people are devising this system.

It’s as if the twin forces of democracy and capitalism, both intended to lead to greater degrees of human freedom and dignity, are in opposition. Disconnected, the forces of capitalism ironically trump the Jeffersonian ideal. One without the other simply cannot work. We need a new education that purposefully rebalances the equation.

And to be honest we must understand and accept that those “cruel people” devising our current education system are somehow none other than us. It’s each of us who must change this, first in ourselves and then spreading outward into our world. And I believe we can.

Going back to the words of Yeats from The Second Coming: ‘the center can not hold… mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…’ I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s because our culture is attempting to hold the wrong center, and that it will take this level of collapse that we see all around us to make way for something truly new -- something more authentic , satisfying and sustainable for our humanity. That is what I prefer to believe, and that is why the Academy was founded. Within this chaos is an extraordinary opportunity to take a step further into the fullness of our humanity.

Azlan White, Mary Ellen Petrisko, Aaron Stern and George Cappannelli

Lunch in the Montana Ballroom

The Academy’s work then is broad scale culture change, which brings me to speak a bit about our strategic vision and programs: our practical applications.

Our strategic plan is culture change, to foster the birth of a new culture of learning, equipped to understand and support education in a new way. We believe that for this to happen, each person must first experience education in a new way, reflect upon it, and then take a clear stand for it. We believe change happens one person at a time through personal transformation and then cultural transformation.

The Academy is activating a collective field of inquiry, growing a “culture-change learning field” – hence the name of our event today. We are taking the lid off learning. Increasing numbers of people -- communities of people -- together are asking deep questions and exploring new forms of education that truly support us in our noble effort to learn what it means to be human beings.

We activate this field everywhere we can. Currently we work primarily among the adults who shape the lives of children, which means most of us, including each of you sitting here today – our learning field here in this room. We invite you to join us.

To achieve our vision, the Academy offers or will offer programming in several program areas: our Personal Leadership programs, new schools initiatives, teacher learning and renewal programs, parenting, our new rites of passage series, as well as organizational advising and research. We will be adding programs for children, once we are settled in our new building.

In all of our programs, no matter their content, we practice, reflect upon, and refine our basic learning methodology – what we call our learning field inquiry. It is this methodology that contains and implements a new kind of learning and education.

On the horizon: in Spring of ’09 we will have a beautiful new home on our land about five miles from here. We are constructing a LEED certified building, a model of sustainability, adjacent to Seton Village, formerly the land of pioneer artist, writer and naturalist Earnest Thompson Seton. The Academy will stand as a beacon for generations to come – a flame reminding us to keep learning alive.

In closing, I would like to ask the Academy staff and faculty to stand. These are my beloved colleagues with whom I learn each day about what it means to be a human being. I feel so deeply grateful to be privileged to walk in the company of each of you.

I invite you now to watch a short film about us. In it you will meet adult students from two of our programs: our Leading by Being personal leadership program, and our Teacher Renewal Program. Since several of these adult participants work with children, you will meet some of the children they serve, as well.