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some alternative schools which see their mission as permitting young people
to “do their own thing” on an individualistic basis, at M-T there’s a strong
commitment to participate and strengthen the school. The students
play a critical role in hiring and evaluating faculty, making planning
decisions, and establishing guidelines and procedures. They even
teach classes -- but only after developing a syllabus which shows what
will be accomplished in each session of the proposed offering.
Respecting and involving
the students pays off, M-T has found. Vandalism in the annex that
has been housing the school (it moved this Fall) is minimal. Morale
among the students is so high that a national drug prevention center funded
by the U.S. Office of Education uses the school regularly as a model of
how a healthy school environment can discourage drug use.
Two pillars of the school
have been Milt Siler and John Sherin, who started the campaign to establish
it when the regular high school became overcrowded in the early 1970’s.
Siler, who resigned (from his Social Studies Department Chairmanship and
Special Assignment at M-T) last year and who is currently writing a book
on education, is continuing his supportive association with the school.
 Commenting
on the role education will play in the coming decade, Sherin had this to
say: “Schools are going to have to listen to and respond better than
they have in the past to the cries of help from young people. Teenagers
are literally dying to get this society’s attention. Suicide, cancer
(which is increasingly being proven to be stress related), and alcohol-related
auto fatalities are already among the major causes of death among the youth
of this nation. That really makes quite a desperate statement when
you think about it.”
Referring to Board President
Felicio’s statement, he continued: “The fourth R must be applied
to Educators and Boards of Education as well. We bear great responsibility
here. Our reluctance in this country to make the changes so desperately
needed to generate alternatives within the public educational structure
are at least partially responsible for the growth crisis in schools.
You see it everywhere. The larger the school system, the larger the
crisis. Families and parents are already the unwitting victims of
Future Shock. They literally don’t know what to do anymore.
They are unable to help themselves. As Educators and Board members
there is much that we can do. We must begin by listening to the children,
to the young people’s cries for help -- to what they are saying they need,
and then seeing to it that those needs are met at a price we all can afford.
Even more important than economic considerations are the human costs which
are already too high. We can save dollars while saving lives.”
GETTING THEIR HEADS TOGETHER
A major focus of the M-T
program structure is on the work of psychologist Robert Ornstein, whose
investigations of the dual hemispheres of the brain and their respective
functions
has shed much light in recent years on a heretofore neglected area of cognitive
research by educators.
“In helping people to know
if they are mostly right brained or left brained, we can assist them to
tap into their own vast unused intellectual and creative potential.
Most people are using a very small percentage of their potential,” Sherin
added. “As the powers of their right and left brain are integrated,
we find students able to accomplish tasks that they never before would
have dreamed possible.”
 The
greatest source of untapped psychic energy of the human being resides in
the right hemisphere of the brain. Conventional education, however,
has tended to reinforce our cultural bias in favor of left brain teaching
and learning. Emphasis upon punctuality, external teacher authority,
competition for recognition and grades, sequential learning -- all these
and more left-brain functions have for years been an integral part of the
lock step system of yesterday’s classroom.
The needs of the future demand
that we learn to develop in students those areas of our right brains that
as a culture we have previously relegated to functions of relative unimportance
in our lives. Long-range planning, development of our intuitive and
even psychic abilities, interpersonal and international skills of cooperation
and accommodation and an increasing awareness and familiarity with the
various levels of human consciousness. These are the very areas that
young people are anxious to get involved in. What they are telling
us is that they want right-brained nourishment. One student from
a nearby school commented after visiting M-T, “Please help save poor under
brain nourished children like myself and extend futuristic education to
my school. I can barely survive here. My creative intelligence
is dying.”
COLLEGE ACCEPTANCE
RATED OUTSTANDING
Over half of the graduates
in the school’s five-year history have gone on to college, including some
to prestigious institutions including Yale, the State University of New
York at Stony Brook and the Julliard School of Music. Minority students
are represented in M-T in the same proportion as they are in the regular
high school population.
The school works well, according
to several outside evaluations. A student’s reading level almost
always goes up after entry, sometimes astonishingly. Two years growth
in reading comprehension (in one year) is quite usual, and some students
leap ahead three, four or even five years.
What does the author of the
recent bestseller THE THIRD WAVE, Alvin Toffler, have to say about the
school that bears his name? “I think the people of Brentwood are
lucky to have such a school. I was unlucky, because it was too late
for my daughter to have a chance to attend a high school like it.”
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