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On March first (all of you new students remember March first all too well, it's the application deadline for new students) while I was digging away somewhere in the top third of what seemed like a 12-foot mountain of new applications, a visitor to the campus came in to learn a bit about ATDP. He asked why so many people go to so much bother to come here in the summer. And, why even after they truly know how much work it is to be invited back, and how much more work it is once you are invited, why do at least 80% of our students come back again and again--even coming from Mexico, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Australia and Taiwan?

I added to his wonder telling him that Professor Enrique Lessa and Professor Maria Paz Echeverriarza were coming from Uruguay, and Michael Katten was coming from India to teach one more time in ATDP? Now our visitor really wanted to know WHY?

I think I know why. And after I have shared my thoughts with you, you will hear from the real experts on the subject--some of those very students who did indeed come back.

My guess is that ATDP is identified by many students and teachers as their intellectual home. Perhaps it is a little odd to think this way about a place in which you only spend a few weeks a year. Yet, there is some kind of a bond that connects all of us at ATDP. There is a certain way in which we look at education that has permitted us, over time, to grow into something that Maxine Greene, a philosopher at Teachers College, Columbia calls a "learning community"[Note 1]

It is this community that is our intellectual home. It is to this community that we all come to learn a very wide range of things. I mentioned students and teachers, but look around the room and see who else is part of this learning community--mothers, fathers, siblings of students, grandparents and other close family members. We are a large, very diverse, very dedicated group.

And because of these characteristics, we are able to support our students as they develop a sense of who they would like to be. Notice, please, that I said who they would like to be, not what they would like to be. The distinction is important, because our goal is to help our students think about the knowledge, the skills, the personal attributes of an ideal citizen of the world for the 21st century. And then, we all work together--you at home, and we in the program--to then move ever closer toward this ideal.

This kind of a pursuit of excellence, this kind of thinking can only take place within a "learning community" of the sort that Maxine Green writes about. It is not only safe to grow in such a community, it is encouraged. Within such a community, students know that they are supported in their search for knowledge, they know that they do not have to fit into a particular mold, but rather that they will always be helped to become distinctive individuals.

The students in our community know that they have responsibilities in the community and to the community, even while they are in the process of growing into responsible adults. They also know that it is their responsibility to do things the very best way they know how.

I think that it is very interesting to realize that it is because of our dedication to our learning community, because of our agreement on what members of our community do and how they speak to each other that we have built a new set of understandings that we hold in common. It is this set of new understandings that bring so diverse a group of individuals together in a way that they all, rather quickly, recognize each other as members of the same community. And from there they grow to working together. And from there they grow into friends and intellectual colleagues.

And dear adults, please think of what we are requiring of the young in order to become part of our intellectual community. They have to make choices and commitments, they have to learn to collaborate, even more than learn to compete. Further they must do what is most difficult of all. They have to be thinking and evaluating constantly, because in our community they cannot just memorize the rules and promise to follow them. They must be informed. They must be aware.

It is within this kind of an environment that the mind can do its very best work and grow into the development of capacities like critical thought, creativity, integrity, persistence when things get rough, and build strength of character.

Our community also provides opportunities for "not knowing"[Note 2] This means that we stress the importance of posing of unexpected questions (you know the big ones with no answers), the making of connections in experience (you know those light bulbs that suddenly go on when you connect something you have learned in theory with something you have done--and you connect it in a way that only you can). And most of all we collaborate on building an environment that supports and furthers the " having of wonderful ideas and dreams."[Note 3]

End Notes

1 "National Standards for American Education: A Symposium." Teachers College Record, Fall 1989, pp 9-14.

2 Eleanor Duckwork, The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1987), p. 13

3 ibid.

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