Laurenvale looks ahead

New theories, new methods, cannot properly be put into practice without study and research. It is Laurenvale’s policy to provide for their staff regular in-service training workshops. Here the teachers have an opportunity to become familiar with the
latest trends in education. At the most recent of these workshops all five Laurenvale commissioners planned and presented one segment of the programme: The Activist school.

It is also Laurenvale policy to finance trips to out of town schools for various staff members who are thus able to observe at first hand the operation of different methods.

During the past ten years Laurenvale's elementary school program has evolved so rapidly that parents whose family includes both a senior high school student and a primary school pupil find that the latter's education bears little resemblance to that received by his older sibling.

And still the changes continue. Yesterday it was streaming. Today the key words are activist education and the non-graded elementary school.

Activism, applied to education, can be described simply as a self-learning situation. It is education which begins with the child, with his interests, his play, his personality. It incorporates also Jerome Bruner's daring thesis that any subject can be taught, at some intellectually honest level, to any child at any stage of development.

Commissioners, administrators, and teachers are reading, discussing, and planning ways and means of introducing these concepts into their schools. By September 1967 the first definite steps will have been taken in the implementation of these plans.

Tomorrow . . . who knows ?