During the school year, 1973-1974, I taught at Greenhill in Dallas. Laurie Doctor and I attended my sister Georgie Green’s Alphabetic Phonics course at Scottish Rite Hospital, and Laurie tutored. We were interested in incorporating phonics into teaching little children and dyslexic students.
We started thinking about how we could help in the world of education. How could we work with kids in a progressive environment incorporating Montessori philosophy and phonics? I started exploring, wanting to do something that was very progressive and focused on the full spectrum of kids.
Convinced that all children are talented in some way or another, the vision was to work with not just selected kids, but average kids, below average kids, and above average kids. We wanted to place strong emphasis on providing an academic foundation of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
At the same time, we were determined to tap into the progressive philosophy and approach of meeting the children at their individual developmental levels while building on their innate enthusiasm for learning. Essential to that goal was providing the right environment, the right resources, and having personal relationships with the students.
Clear Spring School was born in 1974 out of a wonderful mix of forces. Family, education, the culture of that time, and a strong desire to do something positive in the midst of disillusionment arose from the Vietnam War and painful progress toward civil rights. Things weren’t right and it was time to pitch in by helping children realize potential both individually and in community.
In the school’s third year I was invited to speak to the Eureka Springs Rotary Club. I was pleased to have the opportunity to inform the group about Clear Spring and our philosophy. I emphasized my upbringing on 11 acres immediately outside Dallas where I could spend a lot of time in nature exploring around our barn, the kennels, and the pond. I think of how much I learned through free exploration and how much Clear Spring students learned from their camping, field trips, and the nature that surrounds their school.
I was also blessed to have grown up on a school campus. My mother and father founded Greenhill School in Dallas in 1950 when I was one year old. With my mother working at the school, I spent a lot of time there even before I started kindergarten. As I told the Rotarians, I was a mascot of the athletic teams and have ever since placed a high value on physical activity.
My father communicated the ancient Greek view, “healthy body, healthy mind” and I believed it to be true, still do. Being physically active in learning and recreation has been important at Clear Spring from the start.
I went to Greenhill all the way through high school graduation. By the time I reached the upper school I was beginning to reflect on what education was all about. I told Rotary about a respected and stimulating teacher who stated that a positive experience in the early grades is essential to providing a truly effective education, that the most important time was the beginning. My father was emphasizing that point in his late 90s! (The focus at CSS in 1977 was on 6, 7 and 8-year-old children.)
Clear Spring is a dream made manifest and balanced by practicality necessary to provide viable education that supports children moving forward with self-assurance. The dream included learning without the threat of failure that can cripple a child’s self-image. Grades were replaced with progress reports consistent with our view that poor grades are often a reflection of the school failing to provide what many children need to master skills. Rather than pushing mastery of skills on the students, our approach at CSS was to evoke proficiency through the children’s natural enthusiasm for learning.
Back at the Rotary meeting, I shared support for our views citing Jean Piaget who was able to show scientifically what such educators as Maria Montessori knew intuitively and through observation. Children learn from doing, that is, learning is child’s play.
Piaget used experiments to demonstrate that children go through three basic stages. At stage 1, the child has simply not developed basic notions about Numbers, Space, Movement and Time. Stage 2 is an intermediate stage. At stage 3 they demonstrate clear understanding. Here’s just one example: The child is presented with 2 groups containing the same number of same objects arranged in the same way. Though the child agrees they have the same number of objects, changing the spatial arrangements leads an early-stage child to think the number of objects has changed. This is a clear signal that the child is not ready for abstraction, like solving a written arithmetic problem, but would benefit from hands on learning.
Importance was placed on avoiding a child being pushed into doing something they were not yet ready to do. Boredom, hyperactivity, and negative self-image can result. Under such circumstances, negative expectations can be passed on to successive teachers in the form of report cards. Rather than using testing as indicative of a student’s potential or limitations, we relied on teachers’ daily interactions with the students to assess skill levels. Our sense was that there was no other way to be sure what a child is can do.
As a final note, from the start, CSS promoted interaction with the larger community to support the students in art, music, practical skills, and field trips. The benefits included expansion of social studies, scientific insights, vocabulary and language skills.
It is truly wonderful to see that our vision served as a building block. Clear Spring has brought to reality much of what we dreamed. Aspirations have been realized by the hard work and dedication of those who followed us and led the way.
Will Fulton, Founder