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| vii Foreword: Reflections of a Ross School Graduate Nick Appelbaum At the landing of the great Daru Staircase in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace statue is on grand display. Outside the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, feet away from my former high school classrooms, stands a copy of the original. On a ninth-grade class trip to Paris, our teacher commented that we would likely be more intimately familiar with the statue than the majority of the Louvre’s visitors. We had studied Nike not only from books but from the beautiful replica, seeing it each day on our way to classes, and our teachers, representing a mix of academic subjects, had layered our understanding further. Connections were made constantly and consistently across time, culture, geography, and discipline. We soon understood that we were engaged in an educational process that was designed to elicit critical thinking, cure misperceptions and dimness, and lure us into acts of deep personal and scholarly engagement. The Ross School was established with a commitment to an intellectually sparkling curriculum and matched with a beautifully thought-out and detailed set of campus facilities. Embellished with life-size reproductions of the world’s great art, inside and out, it left no view unenriched. The founding leadership wanted to ensure that its graduates would not be left beset and bewildered by fast-paced global change. The school seemed to have a single-minded focus on transcending that vague certitude about preparing students for the twenty-first century—and actually created a tangible educational model dedicated to achieving it. Our teachers eschewed the treatment of knowledge as “motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable,” as Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, once characterized an accepted practice in education. The school and its work, as educator of students and teachers, had a clear sense of how to make learning come alive through interdisciplinary study that was responsive to the latest thinking, brightening each subject to fix our attention. Deliberations on Nike, for example, both at Ross viii | Nick Appelbaum and in the Louvre, aspired to provide the broadest historical and cultural reflections on the statue’s role in building the reputation initially of Rhodes and later of nineteenth-century French power. We took pride in being part of this small community of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds considering such matters. Dedicated and passionate, our teachers developed in us a healthy skepticism toward received opinion, allowing us an opportunity to learn how to construct well-reasoned arguments backed by evidence and to develop the skills and temperament to debate and defend them. Each of us soon felt comfortable creating intellectual frameworks through which to consider all manner of intellectual topics. Our natural curiosity flourished through multiple assignments that encouraged group and, ultimately, individualized study, such as our senior projects. By providing each student the resources to actualize these personally imagined projects, the Ross School engendered in us the belief that our own ideas were worth considering and that we each had the capacity for generating intellectually serious, even significant, creative products. Through a parallel and similarly innovative feature called the process portfolios , we catalogued our progression through assignments and analyzed our own work. In an age where technology allows information to be accessed at breakneck speed, the real talent, the Ross School curriculum suggests, is in developing the strategies necessary to utilize information in inventive ways. We learned not only how to think but how to analyze our thinking. Our visual connection with schools in China and Sweden through groundbreaking technology in real time prepared us well for today’s interconnectedness. Founded at a time of remarkable social, cultural, and technological transformations , the Ross School offered my classmates and me an education consistently aimed toward the future but also customized to our individual learning needs. The Ross School’s adept recalibration of educational priorities has, quite propitiously, transcended its founding campus and spread its approach and philosophy to receptive global locations. Its deliverables to the educational community include a model school, a charter school, an innovative K through 12 curriculum, new ideas about how to create supportive and stimulating learning environments, and a constantly evolving set of teaching practices. These contributions and the joy and ease its graduates have experienced in accepting new learning challenges are the lasting legacies of Courtney Ross’s work. These are legacies in which the Ross community can justifiably derive great pride. ...

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