WORDING

Okay, I have spent a week carefully refining the words for the website description of August To June. Each time I write about the project I get both a new appreciation for the skills involved in saying something with clarity, and a new "aha!" about what we are doing. What was important to me this time was to both emphasize the specificity of this being about one class, and also to concisely give reasons why that might matter to the larger society. First I said it was "to raise" a discussion about our educational goals and values . But the discussion has already been raised by
people as diverse as William D. Green (of the Business Roundtable), Arne Duncan, and Alfie Kohn (The Schools Our Children Deserve) to name just a few who give a feel for the spectrum. So we don't need to raise it, we need to expand the number of people thinking and talking about what they really want for their children, and how we go about getting it. And it needs to be ordinary folks, not just policy makers. And they need examples to draw from. So we can be an example. Clearly everyone won't agree with everything about the model we show, but will some basic agreement about a wider definition of what it means to educate percolate up? Hope so.