Sea World is not the ocean

When I first joined the Misty Meadows community at the beginning of 2023 it was as a parent, with two children at Misty Meadows School. I understood from the beginning that “school” was a bit of a misnomer. There isn’t a huge lot about school as we know it that makes sense to me, and I chose Misty Meadows School specifically for its refusal to capitulate to those norms and standardizations that define the mainstream education system, and increasingly even the “alternatives” to mainstream education.

When Cassie Janisch founded Misty Meadows School in 2012, it was with the following questions:

“How would nature do this?” 

“What if we just trusted children?” 

What followed has been 14 years of lived experience, underpinned by operating principles that provide a grounding for learning as a complex, adaptive, emergent process – with each person at the centre of their own learning, and with endless (complex, adaptive, emergent) fractals emanating in all directions and intersecting with every other person’s version of this same process, all arranged in an endlessly interactive and intricate web.

These principles, and the general modus operandi of Misty Meadows School, were what drew me to it in the first place – and kept me sane in the years prior to finding myself physically in the space. Reading the philosophy and approach of Misty Meadows became an almost daily practice in a time of great personal heaviness (exacerbated by Covid lockdown in a huge city with a baby and a four-year-old) that reminded me that there were others who could see what I could see, and had the courage to act on that vision to turn it into lived reality.

When I joined Misty Meadows as a facilitator at the beginning of this year, it was with the express purpose of gathering various earlier iterations of making-oriented spaces into a dedicated Makerspace that prioritised creative process, and formed part of a new version of Misty Meadows – called then the Wellspring Self-Mastery Collective, and initially designed as an alternative to high school for children aged 12 and up. The birth of Wellspring was partly a response to emerging needs in a time of major upheaval – a large portion of the community had decided that the Misty Meadows modus operandi was not in fact for them, mostly because they had not truly understood what it was in the first place, or quite how much trust it requires, and what that demands from parents in terms of courage, rigour and commitment. Many families left, some in more destructive ways than others, the result being what a co-facilitator described as one of the “out breaths” of the ecosystem. It felt in fact more like a wildfire, and that very quality has accelerated a process that otherwise might have unfolded over a longer period of time, and which has amounted to Misty Meadows School embracing itself as nothing like school at all – and recalibrating as the version of itself that is closest to what it was always designed to be – a space in which the conditions are created and maintained for learning to unfold as a complex, adaptive, emergent process – without apology, or any attempt to contort into shapes more recognisable or comfortable or similar to those that are generally acceptable out there in the world of school.

The hope has always been that if people could just understand a little bit, then they could suspend their assumptions for a moment, and they would see how wonderful life could be for their children, how fully they could really stretch into their true selves, and then do the shadow work required to fully embrace that wonder in all its glorious unpredictability. The trouble is, people don’t suspend their assumptions, and neither do they suspend their fears. 

Carol Black summed up some of this when she suggested that, “Collecting data on human learning based on children's behaviour in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behaviour at Sea World.” Most people only know “education” as a confined tank, controlled feeding times, performance on command, and so whenever the words “school” or even “education” are present, whatever is being said or even shown is filtered through that Sea World lens.

The work we are doing here together at Wellspring is the ocean: wild, alive, interdependent, emergent. 

This is why “explaining” often falls flat – because the paradigm is too different. And yet, there are many people out there, just like I was, searching for something they feel but can’t quite articulate in a way that others can hear, knowing deep in the marrow of their bones that there has to be another way, parents who see clearly that their children will lead the way if they have the courage to let them do so, and also don’t want to do this beautiful, life-affirming, demanding work on their own.

So what, then, do we do? This is the question that we have been pondering all year, as we peel back layers and shed skins, sorting the dirt from the poppy seeds.

The answer is, as most of the best answers are, unclear, but what we do know is that part of our work is honouring clarity as an emergent ever-evolving process, just as much as learning is. 

One of the first steps in finding ways to share unapologetically what we are doing started with reevaluating what we are not doing, what we are not choosing. This continues to be a valuable part of this ongoing process, but we have also come to realise that defining ourselves in relation only to what we are not sets up a false binary, which we are also not choosing.

German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, writing about the industrialisation of art almost a hundred years ago, explored the idea of an artwork’s aura, the unique presence and authority it has in its singular time and place of existence. Benjamin described the aura in terms of its irreducibility, which sets up a paradox that is not dissimilar to the one we are grappling with – you are in the presence of the work, and yet the fullness of what it means, its “authentic being,” is always just beyond your grasp. 

The original artwork (as opposed to the copy) holds its authority in precisely that it cannot be collapsed into immediate comprehension or possession.

So we keep responding to what emerges in the field of collective intelligence that we are moving in together with the children in our care. As it turns out, in times characterised by rapid acceleration of change and destabilisation of existing systems, this might in fact be the sanest and wisest thing we can do – for ourselves and for our children. We are learning to fully embrace all the potential of living with uncertainty as an ally.

For those that are still here with us, we thank you for your support and your trust, your commitment to walking alongside children outside of the reductive frameworks of “education” so that they can unfold into their full potential according to their own intrinsic design. As we go along, we’ll keep sharing the fruits of our process, so that others who might see themselves reflected in this - like I did - can join us on this adventure that has no map.

Welcome to Misty Meadows Wellspring.