What Kind of a School is Oakwood?

As a result, our first Head came from a Quaker school; then Marie Spottswood came from Fieldston; Ham Smith came from North Shore Country Day School; Chris Holabird came from Francis Parker; Jack Zimmerman came from Fieldston. With due allowance for changing times and places, those schools are the kind of school we set out to be, and the kind of school we are.

Oakwood and its models base themselves on principles which date back to the early years of this century, to the work of John Dewey and others at the University of Chicago and at Columbia Teachers College. Dewey and his colleagues began with a concern for two things: how children learn, and how to educate citizens for a democratic society.

On the second of their two concerns, these pioneers asked whether education for a democratic society could originate in an authoritarian classroom of small people sitting in ranks at the feet of a tall infallible fount of wisdom and power. They questioned whether citizens fit to conduct the affairs of a democracy could be produced by a system problems were dealt with from outside, by fiat from a figure of authority. They concluded that one of the objects of education in our society should be to develop the democratic conscience; that is, the capacity for weighing and deciding personal dilemmas and social issues in the light of personal and group needs. They wished to build into the child's developing character an inner sense of responsibility, a sense of right and wrong independent of written codes, rigid rules, or constant direction.

Of course this concept implies outside guidance from the start; but if the goal is to be reached, outside influences must diminish while inner pressures increasingly guide the individual toward an orderly, responsible, and satisfying conduct of life. At Oakwood we truly try to accomplish this educational task of transforming an anarchic and self-centered five or six-year-old into a young man or woman equipped with the self-confidence and self-discipline to make a wise use of freedom.

On the matter of how children learn, the educational pioneers began with a simple and direct observation: small children are full of curiosity, eager to touch, taste, feel, to ask a thousand questions...until they go to school. Then, all too often, boundless curiosity turns to boredom and disinterest. From habit, people accept this peculiarity without noticing how very odd it is. The implication is clear, and we at Oakwood have understood it clearly: we believe that a child's natural curiosity is a force to drive the educational process. We try to use curiosity, to guide it, to arouse and increase it, and never to stifle it.

A second simple observation, with a complex impact on Oakwood and on education in our time, is the notion that children's physical and emotional development directly affects their interests and their capacity to learn; that each child, with his unique genetic heritage, his particular family, his relative position in that family, is likely to mature at his own pace and in his own manner.

Such are the underlying motives for the kind of school we set out to be, and the kind of school we are. In consideration of these motives we believe that children are not empty bottles to be filled, but growing plants to be nurtured; we believe they grow at differing rates and put out different blossoms and therefore need individual sorts of cultivation; we believe that a large segment of an entire human life is spent in school, and therefore school should be a rich and happy experience in itself, not just a road to somewhere else; we believe that children learn by "doing"; we believe in the value of projects which cut across the divisions of traditional subject matter to simulate some of the complexities of actual experience; we believe that the confusing world which assails our senses and minds can be organized and dealt with, not in one way, but in many ways: scientific, historical, esthetic, psychological, economic, etc., and that young people should learn some of the values of all these formative disciplines; we believe that if children are to grow into adults, they must experience freedom gradually, increasingly, and not just be launched at the end of the 12th grade: we believe that minting a unique individual produce a coin with two sides, and that the obverse side is learning to function as a considerate and effective member of a group; and we believe that the best group contains, within a reasonable range, varied talents, varied interests, varied capacities, and varied backgrounds.

That is the kind of school we are...but...but...but...like Fieldston, like North Shore, like Parker, Cranbrook, Beaver, our school is expensive and necessarily draws its support from the upper middle class. And in those schools, every one of their parents, and our parents, expects his child to be admitted to the college of his or her choice. And most of their students, and our students, expect the same. So under the pressure of these expectations, our educational practice moves away from Dewey and Piaget toward Berkeley, Cambridge, and Palo Alto, toward College Boards. Sometimes the pendulum swings too far in one direction or the other, and then we hear from dissatisfied parents --or students --or teachers. However, we are always trying for a more valid compromise.

The tension between what we strive to be and what we have to be is not necessarily bad. It keeps us from being complacent and repetitive. It forces us to take notice dissatisfaction, to be creative in our compromises, to be active in seeking improvement. We think we have a good school -- a very good school -- but we also think that there is value in the conflicting pressures which push us to re-examine our means and our ends, which force us every year to try to grow better.

Oakwood Secondary School
11600 Magnolia Boulevard, North Hollywood, California 91601-3015
Phone 818-752-4400 · Fax 818-766-1285
Oakwood Elementary School
11230 Moorpark Street, North Hollywood, California 91602-2602
Phone 818-752-4444 · Fax 818-752-4466
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