Every day at Tenacre begins with a handshake as the head of school greets arriving students. This act of trust and personal attention sets the tone for all that follows. At Tenacre, we embrace the elementary years. As a Pre-K through Grade 6 coed school, we offer a dynamic and exciting environment in which children progressively develop critical thinking skills, become confident and joyful learners, and move forward into higher education and life as caring citizens.
At the heart of our educational philosophy is the critical need to balance nurture and challenge. Nurture, particularly in the younger years, allows children to grow, feel safe, and develop an empowering sense of confidence--"I can do it." Challenge takes on a greater role as students welcome the opportunity to prove themselves in many difficult learning situations.
Every child at Tenace is a full participant, a valued contributor to our vibrant community. In classrooms, on our playing fields, in art, music, and drama, our students are actively engaged in their own education. It is our belief that when every child has multiple opportunities to succeed, every child can and will succeed.
Our proudest tradition is that of valuing every student. We are a small school where everyone knows each other, where academics, creativity, and good citizenship are high achievements to strive toward, and where children learn firsthand the rewards and responsibilities of being part of a community.
Our focus is on the total child. The goal is to respond to the academic, emotional, physical, social, and moral dimensions of each child with a unique philosophy that creatively combines traditional and innovative elements of elementary education.
Preparing the child for the path, not vice-versa (1/8/18)
We have taken note before in this space of the importance of parenting that “prepares the child for the path rather than the path for the child.” Today I want to look more closely at a basic building block to that preparation: tolerance. To put it bluntly, the path any one of us has to travel in life contains suffering, from everyday disappointments to major setbacks. We have to learn to recognize, allow for, and accept this inevitability or we risk greatly magnifying our suffering by resisting and resenting it. We adults can greatly assist our children in the acquisition of tolerance if we make a conscious effort. In infancy, much of the suffering is with the physical growing pains of basic body regulation. This is, of course, a time of maximum parental attention to smoothing the path. But we also have to be able to acknowledge our limits, to put up with the difficulties of not knowing what baby needs. We also, through careful attention, can begin to sense when to let the infant “cry it out.” Thus begins the first rudimentary step of the child internalizing the capacity to self-sooth in the face of adversity. Once the child becomes ambulatory, we have to tolerate that there will be falls, bumps and bruises, so that the toddler learns to tolerate the same. Once language is there to help, we can point out the requirement of tolerance, such as that there are others in the family with needs and desires, which have to be taken into consideration in everyday functioning, so one’s own personal gratification will have to wait or be modified. In elementary school, hopefully with the educators’ help, the diversity of peer group needs and values supports the acquisition of a sense of fairness: that all have a voice, that you don’t have to agree, that you can argue constructively and make room for difference, but that you’re not always “right” and you’re not always going to “win.” By the teen years, if this progression has gone well, we can hope to see tolerance morphing into a felt moral code, including, by the way, a clarity about what is intolerable in a tolerant society. Tolerance, that is, is not passivity in the face of wrongdoing. Except for major injury or illness, much of our day to day suffering will result from our highly social and often frustrating connections to our fellow humans. That is where our tolerance is most regularly tested. So we might heed Voltaire’s injunction: “What is tolerance? We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: let us forgive one another our follies.”