I’ve read much commentary over the years about the state of education in our country, most of it voiced by politicians and citizens who’ve never taught and some of it voiced by frustrated teachers. I’ve never read an account, though, by someone who has taught at a highly successful school. I did, so I want to stop and tell you about Santa Barbara Middle School.
Back in 1989, immediately before I moved to Santa Barbara to join my new family (a woman I had known in high school and her five year old daughter), I had a midnight encounter with the spirit of Joseph Campbell. Bill Moyer’s famous interviews with Campbell had taken place several years before, after which, Campbell had died. The local PBS station was showing the whole series of interviews uninterrupted over the course of an entire night so that viewers would be able to record them. I hadn’t ever seen the interviews since I didn’t have a TV. I ended up staying up most of the night in a hypnogogic state with some friends listening to Campbell spin his stories of the Hero’s Journey. I felt entranced and altered. Campbell relentlessly gestured toward the Mystery and I was willing to go where he pointed.
I didn’t know that about ten years before, some educators and parents in Santa Barbara had created a new school around this mythological construct of the Hero’s Journey. They felt the most important and unfulfilled time of a child’s development occurred during the junior high years and they wanted to do something about it. They built a school to point toward the Mystery, a school to take kids out of the normalcy of their lives and ask them to confront greater challenges in order to confront themselves. The school out of necessity was created as a private school, not as a replacement of public schools, but rather as an augmentation. Most of the students come from public school and return to public school.
The Mystery is always beckoning to us, though we may not identify it as such. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The DaVinci Code owe their success to our wanting to know more about the conditions of our existence. Even badly written books such as The Celestine Prophecy and Mutant Message Downunder owe their success more to the themes with which they play than the abilities of the author. These themes move us and guide us on a level that is below the radar of our awareness. The themes move us to do great and terrible things because of this lack of direct awareness and conscious deliberation. Kids at the junior high age reflexively begin to look to these themes and yet find no one there to teach them. They begin to think that meaning doesn't exist.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Very interesting. I was living in Santa Barbara at about the same time and reading lots of Campbell and Jung without even knowing some of these teachings were going on around me.
2 - John Spivey
The Pacifica Graduate Institute here is home to the Joseph Campbell archives. They host many of the Jungians like James Hillman, Robert Johnson, and Marion Woodman.
3 - A.L. Harper
John, as always, beautiful thoughts and writing just pour from you finger tips and leave me thirsty for more.
4 - John Spivey
Thanks, Andrea.
5 - Mary K. Williams
Very nice John. You and your daughter are lucky for the experience.
6 - Connie Phillips
Thank you for this, John. It's wonderful to hear about positive things in the education system, and this sounds like a truly amazing school and experience.
7 - John Spivey
Again thanks. I appreciate the comments. I wish more people knew of the existence of such a place so they could know what to move toward. Happy kids in junior high, what a concept.
8 - Mark Saleski
great post john. i printed out a copy to give to my schoolteacher/trouble girl counselor wife. i'm sure she'll enjoy it.
9 - Jon Sobel
This post makes me hope you do write and publish a book about these experiences. Without being familiar with Joseph Campbell, the very young me decided my life was going to be a journey into and through mystery. It would have been nice if the experience of school had aligned with that, instead of mostly resisting it.
10 - John Spivey
Thanks Mark and Jon. I hope the Mystery is alive and well with you.
js
11 - nugget
This sounds like one of those "too good to be true" spiels. No offense John, but I am very skeptical of private education. I have found that these "alternative" options turn out to be reactionary education that only succeed in propitiating spoiled philistines further encouraging any cultish leanings rather than teaching children NOT to think according to bias or group standards. How much was Campbell charging for this esoteric experience?
12 - John Spivey
nugget-
Campbell had nothing to do with the school. We were not teaching "spoiled philistines." The program is more like Outward Bound lite when it comes to the trips. Kids would have to sweat and toil and then come back to help prepare meals for the rest of the group. Many of the graduates have become quite independent people and thinkers. The trouble now is that parents ARE wanting to turn it into a school for "spoiled philistines," because that's what they think life is about. Narcissism tends to always want to validate itself.