Upper School
What We Believe
Helen Taylor Bush, who believed that children should be trusted and that school should spark a child's natural passion for learning and accomplishment, founded The Bush School in 1924. Mrs. Bush believed that a school should create an environment of beauty, comfort, and intimacy in which rich experiences and a strong sense of community foster the overall development of the child.
Although The Bush School has grown dramatically, the founding premise has not changed. We want Bush graduates to be personally and deeply engaged in their education and interested in becoming active citizens in a pluralistic democracy and global community. To do this Bush students must be broadly literate. We believe that literacy extends beyond verbal and mathematical facility to include aesthetic and intuitive capacities. Although acquiring a good education is necessary, it is not sufficient. We prepare our students to make use of their education. Competent citizens must be able to think critically, inquire and create new answers, be capable of thoughtful judgment, and work in a group. We believe that students educated at Bush should demonstrate growth in expressiveness, capacity for inquiry, a sense of self, a sense of inter-relatedness, creativity, and adaptability to change.
Our program prepares students for college, but even more, we are concerned that the quality of their experience extends continuously from the present through a life of learning. We create an environment rich and rewarding in its own right, where motivation rises out of students' interests, close relationships with faculty, and their fascination with emerging capacities. We believe education lasts a lifetime.
We provide real tasks with real consequences. Through these experiences, we afford opportunity for genuine success, a variety of accomplishments, and failure as a means of learning. We want students to develop self-knowledge and to accept management of their own learning.
We view learning as a process. For us, knowledge is related to various modes of inquiry and is not fixed or immutable. We believe that learning is not limited to individual enterprise; learning is a social act. The classroom is therefore viewed as a learning community, a place where the collective goal is to inquire about how all students learn, what students know, and how all members of the school can extend their learning through interaction with others. Interdependent learning requires highly developed communication skills. Therefore, modes of expression are fundamental processes taught in every subject.
Toward these ends we believe that teachers need to be committed to the whole of school life, be broadly educated, and consider the subject area as their avocation. We seek students who are academically capable, highly motivated, socially conscious, and responsible. We depend on parents to support our aims and values.
We aim to prepare students for life in a diverse society. Diversity encompasses not only racial, socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural differences but intellectual, age, and functional differences as well. Living and working with people of diverse backgrounds strengthens and broadens the character and well being of all students and prepares them for community living.
At The Bush School, the learning community is nurtured and sustained in a number of ways. First, we practice the Community Conduct Code expressing expectations about appropriate conduct. Second, we meet regularly in community meetings to practice clear communication and the democratic process. Community meetings bring students together to deal with issues confronting the community and to be involved with decision-making. We seek to provide safe environments in which students can express opinions and participate in constructive action. We expect students to attend Town Meeting, Forum, Advisory and Class Meeting each week.
The Bush Upper School community is further strengthened through programs such as class retreats, Community Service Day, Fall Festival, outdoor program trips, and the Action Module Program (AMP). In each case, students are asked to engage in active learning with classmates and teachers in the spirit originally articulated by Helen Taylor Bush.