Audio: Jack and Esther Dieckmann (mp3, 5 min 10 sec)
Edited Transcripts:
Jack Dieckmann serves as Associate Director of Curriculum at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE). Jack completed his doctorate in mathematics education at Stanford in 2009. He is also an instructor in methods and language courses in the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). He has worked as a public high school math teacher, a professional developer, and an education research associate.
Jack: Good morning. We’re the parents of Joseph, who’s a student at Living Wisdom High School. We’ve been with Living Wisdom for more than nine years, and our daughter now attends the K-8 Palo Alto Living Wisdom School.
Given that my professional field is education, I spent a great deal of time trying to find the right school for Joseph – I visited and studied a wide variety of schools, and I interviewed the people, and I shadowed and observed.
And then I came across this jewel of a school, Living Wisdom School of Palo Alto, and I couldn’t believe it. I really could not believe that such a school existed, because I had never seen anything like it, and I had never encountered a school like this one in my work in education.
We enrolled Joseph at LWS for his first year with Kshama as his first-grade teacher, and it was fantastic. I couldn’t believe that I could leave my child, the most precious thing in my life, leave him there and feel totally confident that he would be loved, supported, and that he was going to grow and be nurtured. And I’ve had that feeling all the way through, including his time at Living Wisdom High School, where I know that I’m leaving him in good hands, and that he’s not only going to be challenged with a rigorous curriculum, but he’s also going to add meaning to his life.
Public schools do their best, but as a parent who taught math in public high school I know that they are large systems, and that the learning is very often first and foremost about how to obey rules, how to follow, how to be passive, and how to do the homework that’s handed to them. And the poor students do the best they can, but there’s no sense of agency or active learning or finding their place in the world, or finding meaning in what they’re doing. Adolescence in particular is such a difficult time, and those are exactly the kinds of questions they should be asking.
Living Wisdom offers a unique program that I wish all students everywhere could benefit from, because they’re giving the individual student a chance to understand who they are in relation to their world, and not just be sort of college-ready.
That’s a big term now, “college-ready.” But many students, even those who go on to college, and even those who get good college grades, don’t know why they’re there, and they don’t know the horizon they’re moving toward, because they’re just following the rules.
I’m very happy to say that our experience of Living Wisdom School has been the opposite – that we are not raising a passive rule-follower, but somebody who is trying to understand his place in the world, his purpose in the world, and who’s very actively contributing to that purpose.
Esther Peralez-Dieckmann has over 25 years of experience in workforce and economic development, human services, and policy advocacy. A well-known community leader, she has earned numerous distinctions for her work and leadership on behalf of women, children, and families. She currently is Executive Director of Next Door Solutions to Domestic Violence in San Jose.
Esther: I feel that the approach they take at Living Wisdom is very practical, because everybody wants their child to be loved, to be safe, and to want to go to school. And we haven’t had any issues with our children not wanting to go to school, because they’ve been very excited every day about coming to Living Wisdom.
When it comes to how we educate our children, my stance is practical, too, because everybody wants their child to get a good job someday and be very happy in their work. And as somebody with nearly thirty years’ experience in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors, one of the first things I look for, and that we need in the workforce, is people who can think critically, people with empathy, people who understand the needs of others and that know how to work with other people, and that can deal with adversity.
You need lots of personal skills to have a good career and to stay in a good job, and I feel those are among the skills my kids have picked up at Living Wisdom, including the ability to know yourself, to be loved and appreciated for your differences and for all the things you are, and to have the chance to explore figuring out who you are, what you love, and what’s your passion. And all of the steps, all of the activities, and all of the outings at Living Wisdom have been carefully designed to accomplish just that.
I’ve been thinking about resource allocation, because we all know that the economy isn’t great right now, and organizations and businesses are dealing with severely limited resources.
I’m thinking of when we took the Living Wisdom School students on a camping trip to the Malakoff Diggins in the foothills of the Sierra. At one point, it felt like we might run out of food – we were close to civilization, so it’s not as if we were endangering the children, but we were there for three days and we had to keep an eye on the supplies. I was very impressed by how the kids pitched right in and cooked and did the dishes, and generally accepted the situation and cheerfully helped out. And when I look back over the nine years we’ve been with Living Wisdom, I realize that all of those activities and experiences have had a tremendous relevance for helping our children learn to thrive in the real world, and that there isn’t a price you can put on them.
So if you’re looking at Living Wisdom as an option, I can say that you really must look at the total educational experience, and how you can raise children who’ll never want to stop learning. Because that’s really the way to advance in a career – always eager to learn while loving the process and knowing how to think of others. We’re trying to solve the problems that are affecting our world, and we urgently need thinkers like the students that are coming through Living Wisdom.