We’re a few months short of a year working on this project together, and I can’t say I know that much more about George than I did before. Our People’s Press meetings at the new Woody Creek Community (“Commie”) Center (aka WC3) with Mirte Berko Mallory, Daniel A. Shaw, and now Carrie Click Kallstrom (an Aspen native who lives in Rifle now with her husband and their horse and camel boarding business) have illustrated  George’s determination to enhance community, yet balk the traditional, legal system at every juncture. It’s not always clear at the time whether George questions authority just for the sake of questioning authority, how steadfast he is in staying put in his outlaw corner, or whether he is consciously acting as the teacher to a roundtable of societal victims. For instance, in developing our publishing company, George brushed off the importance of liability insurance, copyrighting, ISBN numbers. The rest of us urged him to reconsider, and Daniel took on the responsibility of consulting with an intellectual property attorney. But George’s story about liability insurance and the Aspen Community School did force us to reconsider the ugly business of assigning a big company the task of covering your ass. “We never had liability insurance at the Community School,” George explained. “When people asked me why, I said that if someone wanted to sue us, I would tell them that they’d be suing the entire school, not a large insurance company. If they wanted to be responsible for taking down the school, that was their prerogative. And kids got hurt, of course. Shit happens. But in thirty years, no one sued us.”

With sixty-five years of playing with the camera, George doesn’t shoot multiple times for a photo, even with a digital one. He takes one shot, focusing on one singular breath. That’s all he needs to define the image. He rejects movies and television because their images go by in rapid fire. As soon as he’s settled on one frame, it’s off to the next, when he believes there’s really only one frame worth contemplating in each scene.

Yet, with People’s Press’ first release, Gaylord Guenin’s and George Stranahan’s “It’s Not All Fishing to Fish”, George overlooked many, glaring mistakes and alignments. He simply wanted to get it out, and it did in turn sell over 50 copies merely through a book signing at WC3. Meanwhile, Carrie is now editing the book before we market it to local retailers. Aren’t the scientist and the photographer by nature obsessed with details? Is it the apparent lack of time left, or exhaustion, that makes George push things through before they are nit-picked, foundation-heavy and ready, or the rebel, the guru, the visionary, who usurps the standard protocol?

It’s hard for me to read George’s inner self in person. I am too young, too immature, too removed, to gage where his thoughts are taking him, without taking it personally. If I step back from myself, I can see a man who doesn’t concentrate too much on the individual, on the silly notion of liking or disliking people, but who ruminates on the specific’s role with respect to the general, questioning how each of us and himself fits into the larger scenario. As many instances as I have interacted with George, shared good conversation and a few meals, he is still more of a concept to me than a whole person. I don’t see how that could change, really. You’d have to be his child, his wife, a bona fide intimate I think to know him any other way, if even then perhaps. This would explain his handing over his sturdy stack of personal documents when we began this project. “Here,” he was telling me. “This is me, in the best way that I know how to let you in.” And this literary character of his is still just a character, as is the one I create of myself in words. It is the character we can best reckon with publicly, retrospectively, that we suspect others can relate to somehow.

On George’s 75th birthday in 2006, members of the Community School’s extended family, wrote him letters of appreciation:

(Inside a card with the following quote inscribed on the front: “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” Albert Einstein)

Happy Birthday, George!

All of us at COMPASS are so grateful for the schools you helped to create, and for your vision that leads us still. In honor of your 75th birthday, and the many gifts you’ve bestowed upon COMPASS, the Board would like to plant a tree on the campus next spring. I’ll stay in touch with you when we get closer to scheduling a ceremony.

In the meantime, enjoy the enclosed birthday wishes. I also thought you would enjoy this recording of Jonathan Kozol, which filled me with inspiration and thoughts of you.

Much love,

Skye [Executive Director of COMPASS]

I titled my talk about Schools rather than about education because, in fact, quite a bit is known about education. A lot is known about schools too; my point will be that in today’s changing world there are conflicts, predicaments and paradoxes about what schools are supposed to be and what schools are supposed to do, whereas there is growing consensus about education. Education as a word comes from the Latin Educare, “to lead out”, In common language it seems clear that education is about learning.

Dear George,

Happy Birthday! I miss having you involved with CCS [the Carbondale Community School] – all the time. I think of your challenges to us when you were our Executive Director – to be creative, to let children choose what they want to study, to get out of the way instead of trying to “teach,” to allow for chaos, to adhere to progressive education philosophy…In many ways, you helped shape me for the second half of my teaching career – and I thank you for it. I hear news of you from Morgan and Forest, but I miss having opportunities to talk with you. I hope you are well and happy and bestowing your visionary ideas on others.

Lots of love,
Francie Jacober

I will give a little list of some “knowns” about learning. We know, for example, that all humans, and particularly children, are natural and eager learners. The ability to learn has obvious survival value and evolution has favored this trait: learning is hardwired into human DNA by the evolutionary process, by survival of the fittest. It seems likely that the same is true of language, evolutionary forces have similarly hardwired language into our DNA and this is a likely explanation for the remarkable fact that children learn their first language in under two years and with no previous experience. And language, spoken or unspoken, is part of our thought process and hence integral to learning.

We know that children (as well as adults) learn not at all if they are physically or emotionally threatened. We know that adequate social experience is both necessary and even an essential part of learning. Vygotsky suggests that the conversation amongst children, children just talking amongst themselves, is a necessary component of learning. We know that people learn best from their strengths. We know that relevant, real life experiences are effective for learning. We know that unless children have enough concrete, doing things, experiences their abstract knowledge is merely superficial, i.e. rote memorization. We know that all learning is inter-related; it is not isolated subjects like history, geography, English or math, it is about people, things, events, ideas and possibilities. We know that learning is about empowerment. We know that each learner is rather unique in psychological and intellectual makeup, that they have differing learning styles, differing strengths, weaknesses, differing rates of acquisition; the ideal educational experience is undoubtedly different for each learner.

Philosophically these ideas are not new, Rousseau the romantic philosopher with his belief that the native child is fundamentally good, pure, and innocent, corruption, if any, comes from society whose self-interest is to maintain an unequal distribution of wealth through deceit, hypocrisy and so on. Dewey, the more pragmatic and evolutionary philosopher, said that human nature is a matter of possibilities, that childhood is a time for children to be children and to learn through their living experiences. Matters such as these are assumptions, of course, rather than knowledge. Dewey started the progressive school movement by making these assumptions into principles. The “eight year study” in the United States and the Plowden report in Great Britain both studied the college careers of students who had come from so-called progressive schools. The results were that they did “as well or better than their traditionally trained peers in terms of grades. They did much better on measures of initiative, creativity, capacity to pursue their own interests, and ability to conduct independent research.”

Dear George,

I attribute my teaching philosophy, my lifestyle, my political beliefs, the way I want to raise my family, and my communication skills to the Roaring Fork Teacher Education Project and the years I’ve spent at Community School, and I owe much of that to you. Every time you came over for a community dinner at the rooming house, you planted wisdom about politics and education into my head that are helping me on my path towards making a difference. You have shaken my world with your radical ideas, causing me to ponder difficult questions about education late into the night. As an educator, I have daily conflicts in my head about societal pressures to perform and what I truly believe about learning, and that all goes back to you. You inspired me during highlanders, community dinners, workshops, and classes to continue grappling and trying. I know you’ve touched a lot of people in this valley and have inspired many people to make a difference in our communities. The most important thing you’ve done, however, is challenge us to think beyond the status quo. I am forever infected by your desire to make this world a better place, no matter what the personal cost. Thank you so much for touching me in this way. I hope you have a wonderful birthday. Sincerely, Michelle

The progressive movement still exists, there are many progressive schools in the world, the school where I work describes itself as such. We enjoy quite a little “I told you so” as we see current research on learning vindicate the progressive approach even as it refines our knowledge of child development. We’re becoming main stream under new names like Child-oriented education and student-directed learning.

The verb to school comes from middle English to reprimand; the noun now is applied to institutions that have been developed where we send children. There was good reason to invent schools, and good reason to make them public, tuition free and required.  Universal education is a powerful dream; and today’s predicament is trying to provide an equal and quality education to all through this institution called school. And from now on I am talking about the pre-college public education system. So we send them all to school to get taught. Ivan Illich, in his book Deschooling Society , makes the case that the principal lesson school teaches is the need to be taught. School’s teaching creates a dependence on school - and teaching - and a superstitious addiction to belief in its methods. That’s a powerful idea: that we become addicted to the notion that in order to learn we need to be taught.

George Happy Birthday! One cool thing is how your thinking and actions have and will continue to bring people out of the shadows and open to a bigger, better picture of humanity. You have made a difference in my life and so many others.
Love, Cindy

The first question is “what is the mission of the institutions called school?”  I was sent away to an eastern boarding school, and these places seem to all have a Latin slogan that characterizes what the school finds important. My particular school’s slogan translated into “Once warned, beware” which was a description of their disciplinary beliefs. I learned little there, but I did learn not to get caught twice. That’s one way to announce the intention of a school. What about this vast public system?  Who decides their mission and what is it? Of course the one answer is that society as a whole decides the mission and does so through the political process. What the mission is then comes from many voices. The Council of Chief State School Officers takes the following as a self-evident truth: “That all children have the potential to learn rigorous content and achieve high standards and that a well educated citizenry is essential for maintaining our democracy and ensuring a competitive position in a global economy.”

I’ll leave rigorous content and high standards alone as simply undefined.

Dear George,
What an inspiration you have been to me over the many years. I have learned so much from you. I think of you on a regular basis when I am planning or doing a science activity. A little voice in my head is saying, “George would be happy to see this.” You are a great mentor. Thank you for all you have done for me and for Eddy as well. We have both benefited greatly from your nurturing spirit. Happy Birthday. Thanks for letting me be a part of your life.
Love, Linda

I do believe that schools and democracy should have vital linkages; that schools should model democracy in its most unpoliticized sense, that schools should empower students through the explicit practice of democracy. In practice, of course, schools do not do this at all. They model instead a top-dog under-dog layer cake with the children as the bottom layer of under-dog and the teachers just one layer up.

These people are not alone in declaring a major mission for schools to be the economic competitiveness of the U.S. I think that this is new in the last decade when our competitiveness has become questionable. It is however representative of our predilection to make into a mission for schools the solution of any of society’s current problems.

George – It has been my pleasure to know & work with you the past many years. Every time I chat with you, you always challenge me to expand my thinking. Sometimes it works & sometimes it doesn’t, but you always force me to think. I guess this is what teaching is all about!!!
Happy Birthday,
Jim Curtis

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