When asked what typified their experiences while students of the Aspen Community School, graduates responded almost unanimously, “You took me seriously.”

Even if George has been left somewhat broken-hearted with the end result of his leadership work with COMPASS (the nonprofit umbrella for the Aspen Community School, Carbondale Community School and the Early Childhood Center), in that it is not the pure egalitarian ideal he had imagined, COMPASS is unarguably a refreshing and progressive alternative to other preK-8th grade educations available in the Roaring Fork Valley. As stated in its mission, COMPASS is a setting for lifelong discovery, and a community of individuals who share a passion for learning, children and personal and societal responsibility. www.discovercompass.org

“A parent would come and say, ‘You know, I went to Catholic School and just hated it,” George recounts, “and then they would end up saying, ‘and I want your fifth grade to be identical to what I had experienced…I learned semi-colons in fifth grade, and Latin, and I want you to do that.’” And as principal of the School, George would often retort, “Look, if you really want your fifth grader to learn semi-colons, I will personally give him one half-hour a week. Will that work?”

Education by far has been the most prominent subject of George’s professional work and writings. From his days as an undergraduate student of physics at CalTech, a graduate student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, post-doctorate at Purdue University and Associate Professor at Michigan State University until his awakening in 1972 after a year of teaching high school science in Okemos, Michigan, George learned that he was 1) a scientist in the truest form of its definition, and 2) not made to walk in anyone else’s rubber-soled cloth loafers except his own.

By opening his home and ears to his three sons (then 16, 14 and 11) and their friends, George realized that these kids were finding high school as “irrelevant to their current lives and to what they had anticipated to be their future lives” as he was finding out about his own days at the university.

Betsy, their Catholic mother was, I believe, as confused as I was by these times and circumstances. I think she fundamentally believed that these institutions such as churches and schools might need fine tuning but were generally the way things were ’spozed to be. She smoked cigarettes and drank either scotch or jug wine.

The university where I taught respected my right to protest the Vietnam War—academic freedom, you know—but was ambivalent or less when I would tell my 600-student sophomore physics class that there wouldn’t be class the next day because I was “marching down to the state capitol and would truly appreciate their company.” I had not done much of anything for the civil rights movement, but had come to believe that segregation could be ended, desperately believed that a wrongful war could be ended, and therefore, wrongful institutions destroyed, diverted or transformed.

A lot of what I was learning from these high school kids who visited my house suggested that schools were an institution that needed major transformation. It was not serving its purposes for too many kids, if indeed it even understood its purposes. And I guess I was ripe for that message.

These high school kids who talked to me had had a strong effect. I didn’t know it then as I know it now, but it was these experiences that led me away from the university, away from physics, and into a studied activism about education and schools.

Thus also commences George’s life as a rancher and single parent raising his two eldest boys in Woody Creek; and an almost forty-year friendship with his neighbor Hunter S. Thompson and his son Patrick’s classmate Eddie, a woman whom George continues to correspond with who has been in and out of institutions for schizophrenia since her twenties.

Of Eddie, George notes, “She writes of her voices and of her electroshock therapies, of her family as much as she can remember. She writes crazy things, but they are, as I said before, honest. And you know, honesty, like leaning into the wind, will get you everything.”

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