Chapter 8 - The secret heart of learning

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The secret heart of learning	285

It has its own central bank, trading bank, courts, currency, lawyers, publishers and businesses. It publishes its own newspaper, magazines and yearbook, so its "staff" learn to write as reporters and editors, to produce as publishers and computer operators. Its "citizens" use their own currency to sell and buy each other's goods and services. And they learn all about interest rates, bank deposits, profit and loss accounts.
  Parents are closely involved. One computer consultant is there two hours a day. But he doesn't think of it as a school. "We're a family," he says, "school and parents and students together."17
  As principal Sue-Ellen Hogan told the PBS special television report in 1990: "We want it to be an interactive society." Regular classes take up four hours a day, before the school turns into a "Micro Society". But even the classes are geared to the real world. Says one teacher: "I teach publishing, not English." But the students learn both. Discipline? Not surprisingly, the students handle that mostly themselves: run their own court cases, with charges, prosecution, defence and juries. Civics as a subject? "It's not just part of the curriculum; it's part of everyday life."
  Its students perform well above grade levels on all standardized tests. But its parents, teachers and students think that's a minor part of the achievement. The school is based firmly on the principle that experience is the best teacher. And that education is grounding achievement and self-esteem in practice.
   An even faster dramatic improvement in standards has come at the Emerald Middle School in the Cajon Valley Union School District, San Diego coounty, since principal Nancy J. Girvin introduced a wide-ranging program of values education, character-development and brilliant innovation.
  Ten years ago co-author Vos found Emerald School so poor she refused to allow her second daughter to attend it. But today Emerald is a national model. Thanks to a $1.2 million renovation in 1994-95, the campus has 45 beautifully upgraded classrooms, including seven fully-equipped science labs, five computer labs and a school-wide computer network with Internet access. Every school day begins with an interactive television show run by the students. And not only do the classrooms and corridors glow with colorful posters, but students add HyperStudio Stack graphics to their daily TV presentations that publicize the school's values and character-building program.
  Emerald has its own space shuttle laboratory, run by teacher Jim

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