For too many students, schools are like factories. They are large institutions where they are inspected, tested, and rated until they are passed on to other schools or employers where they are further tested and rated.
In July 2014, before the pandemic and when teaching, learning, and gathering was easier, LACS had its 40th Anniversary Celebration reunion. I went to the reunion thinking about all the dreams students had had for their lives, thinking even about my own dreams. How many saw their dreams realized? How many would remember the school, and me, fondly and think we had prepared them well for the world? As soon as I opened the door to the beautiful guesthouse where the first reunion event was held, I had my answer.
But first, think about dreams. There are so many different, even conflicting, ways we use the word ‘dream.’ Night dreams can feel like an expression of what is most intimate to us, unknown to our own conscious awareness as well as to others. So, we often push them away. We live our lives surrounded by a largely unknown territory of our own making.
Then there are daydreams. By daydreams we can mean those moments when we drift from the reality of now into flights of fantasy. Or we imaginatively explore possible courses of action or the meaning of different experiences. We use the mind like a chalkboard or play movies of our own creation and explore scenarios of what might be. We set our mind free.
How well we use our capacity to dream depends on how much we are aware of what we’re doing. After a night-dream, we might think of our self as the hero or heroine. But that can be deceiving. We perceive or experience each scene in a dream from either the perspective of a character in the dream who looks like us or from a “godlike” perspective looking down on it.
We can take this person who looks like us for the self, but I think this is a mistake. I think each dream image is ambiguous, probably in several ways, but one way is that each element of the dream is yours. You are not just any one character but everyone, the whole scene.
When you have the nightmare of being overwhelmed by a flood, you are not just the being overwhelmed. When you are hugged by the love of your life, you are both hugged and hugging. You can take in the whole as revealing something about yourself, not just one element of it.
And this gets us back to the reunion which lasted from Friday night to early Sunday evening. Saturday included an ASM, or All School Meeting, as part of a Symposium on Education. At LACS, once a week the whole school meets to discuss some issue or proposal or to share an event together. So, this was a poignant blast from the past for many graduates.
Dr. Dave Lehman, the founding father of the school and first principal, brought a proposal to the group. In the school handbook, the school’s mission is defined as creating global citizens, persons of character who strive to be caring, kind, sensitive to others, trustworthy, recognizing when there is bias, etc. Dr. Dave proposed that we add compassionate.
In Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, the Dalai Lama defined compassion as “concern, affection, and warm-heartedness; …the essence of compassion is the desire to relieve the suffering of others.” It is to take action to relieve suffering. We ignore our own inner lives—and the inner lives of others— “at our own peril.” The motion passed overwhelmingly.
In her introduction to the ASM, Diane Carruthers, the principal at the time, quoted educator and activist Septima Clark as saying “education is freedom.” I’d add, to go along with Dr. Dave, that the recognition of interdependence is freedom. Compassion is freedom. A graduate, Megan Hanna, helped develop this connection. She said that compassion for others begins with compassion for oneself.
We are too often miseducated into thinking that our welfare is opposed to that of others. This leads to feeling torn, bound, isolated. As in a dream, recognizing that the whole dream situation and all the characters in it are you is liberating. Compassion is liberating as it wakes us up to how important relationships, our surroundings, and the quality of our experience are to us. It allows us to open in inconceivable ways. We ignore this truth at our own peril and the peril of our planet.
Certainly, one of the assignments of childhood is to bounce against boundaries. We test out where we end so we can discover where we begin. We are given this homework assignment as children, but our education continues throughout life. We are born with no notion that we, or our needs, have an end. But soon we start thinking of the skin as our boundary line. But one of the main functions of skin is to feel the world. And certainly, as teenagers, we feel. What we think of as our end is thus a beginning.
We realize our own capacities not as much by opposing what is “outside” the skin but by contacting it. Only then can we know it. Even to fight something, we need to first know it. Our end, the skin, and the “rest of the world,” or our capacity to feel, is thus where we begin.
And this is what the reunion showed me. Leaving the school was an opportunity for graduates to learn the meaning of their dreams, which includes the meaning of their schooling and community. We are always embedded with others in a world, like a dream character is embedded in the dream. Students told us that what LACS did for them was allow them to be themselves. It gave them the freedom to trust and thus discover themselves and to speak from that process of discovery.
It did the same for me and other staff members. We all knew we were doing something meaningful. We trusted students (with some careful watchfulness). We tried our best to nurture others and in turn were nurtured. What we gave we received. I never felt so accepted by a large group as I felt at the reunion.
I came to the reunion hoping to hear that every student was a success and their dreams realized, but students made clear to me I had an outdated notion of success. Success is not about worldly recognition. The mark of a successful life is how we live, and how much we play an important role in other people’s lives ⎼ and they play a role in ours.
This all ties into the mirroring quality of compassion ⎼ how we live with ourselves is mirrored by how we live with others. We are all, as environmental activist John Perkins said, dreaming the world together. And in recognizing that, I think most of our students are clearly a success, or they’re on the way to it.
**This is a re-write of an earlier piece published in From the Finger Lakes: A prose Anthology, and on my website.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Featured image courtesy of author
