Transformative education

  • November 28, 2017
Transformative education

Laura Marcus speaks about how she founded and developed the Arete Project.

Very few of us get to create our own religious or political community, but we do get to educate our children in the way we want. Examining how schools represent our ideas about the world – and our hopes for it - has been my guiding intellectual fascination.

Laura Marcus

Laura Marcus has long been interested in how the education system can better prepare young people for democratic citizenship. At high school she was an activist, taking part in protests against the Iraq war. It was there that she discovered Deep Springs College which follows a two-year liberal arts curriculum in a remote part of California and where students lead class discussions, work 20 hours a week on the school’s ranch and farm and play a significant role in institutional decision-making. “It’s very participatory, very experiential,” says Laura. 

The College, where she worked between graduating from Yale and starting at Cambridge, inspired her to set up her own alternative model of higher education and she is already getting wide recognition for her work. Her Arete Project was recently featured in The New Yorker magazine and Laura is planning to expand its campus to Alaska in the next few months. The Arete Project has been running for four years, including during Laura's time at the University of Cambridge.

Laura, who is finishing her PhD in history and education at Stanford, says what unites her MPhil and what she has been doing since is “how ideas get translated into reality” and how educational institutions embody particular ideals. She says: “Very few of us get to create our own religious or political community, but we do get to educate our children in the way we want. Examining how schools represent our ideas about the world – and our hopes for it – has been my guiding intellectual fascination.”

No Child Left Behind

For her MPhil at Cambridge she studied school accountability reforms in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, in particular the No Child Left Behind Act. “The Act was designed to enforce accountability in schooling and passed with sweeping bipartisan success. But very quickly it became a punching bag. I saw in that example how people – especially Americans – use schools as a way to confront massive social problems rather than other state apparatuses. That legislation also contained many assumptions about the relationship between schooling, citizenship and democracy. I wanted to explore how the reform came out of commitments to educational excellence and inclusion, as well as who should be held accountable for that,” she says.

Laura was also interested in how the reform worked in reality, for instance, what duties students, parents, teachers and others had compared to government. “My original idea shifted from how we get students to be part of a democratic education system to how governments design education policy in a way that reflects their ideas of how not only schools, but also society should work,” she says.

While she was doing her MPhil in Education, Laura, who was based at Clare Hall College, supported the Arete Project's move after its first summer from California to North Carolina. That meant developing relationships with people in North Carolina, hiring new faculty and recruiting students.

Education and citizenship

For her PhD Laura is studying the ways schools were deployed to address problems of citizenship in the US between 1880 and 1920 as the US state pushed across the continent in the wake of the Civil War. “A lot of the questions reformers were wrestling with are the same as we are wrestling with today. They have always been the challenge of the US project – how to honour the idea of e pluribus unum, how you bring all these different people together as one nation. In school policy you can see the tensions reformers faced in trying to assimilate groups who had different cultural and educational traditions. Enforced assimilation looked quite brutal during that era, but you can see intimations of these same issues today in debates about bilingualism or the charter school movement,” says Laura.

She is about to move to Alaska to be with her partner who is an oceanographer and will be working full time on the Arete Project from her new home. She hopes eventually to develop a campus there. “I have known for a long time that this is going to be my life’s work,” she says. Like Deep Springs College, the Arete Project involves a small cohort doing experiential, liberal arts and sciences education in a wild setting. Its three educational pillars are liberal arts, physical labour and student self-governance.  Historically, Deep Springs College has only admitted men, so the Arete Project has only admitted women. With Deep Springs going co-ed next year, the Arete Project will begin running co-ed programmes (in addition to its all-women programme) in 2018 or 2019.

Arete Project students can sit on a range of committees covering everything from applications to outreach and hiring faculty and these responsibilities continue even after the programme ends. Alumnae have arranged their own convention and there is also an alumna on the board of directors. “I think the Arete Project offers something really valuable in our current social and political climate. It is a powerful re-imagining of higher education,” says Laura.

This year there were several international students on the programme. Laura [2014] is looking to diversify the applicant pool more, in recognition that many past students have been from elite colleges. The programme costs $500 for eight weeks over the summer and there are full scholarships available. Students grow their own food and construct some of their own shelter.

“That closeness to nature is important for teaching interdependence. The small, heterogenous groups mean there is space for people to have challenging conversations across boundaries of difference,” says Laura. “Given the fracturing of our social sphere, these are conversations we desperately need to be having. One of the most transformative parts of the programme is that people have to engage with very different attitudes than they are used to.”

 

Latest News

The process of history-making

Olin Moctezuma-Burns [2020] is keen not to repeat the patterns of some past researchers and to give back to the communities she studies. For that reason she recently co-organised an international gathering of Imagining Futures projects on archiving indigenous and traditional knowledges in Sotuta, Yucatan. The meeting brought together people from Colombia, Peru, Kenya, Tanzania, […]

How might extreme heat contribute to human migration?

Rising temperatures due to climate change are likely influencing human migration patterns, according to a new study co-authored by Gates Cambridge Scholar Dr Kim van Daalen [2018]. The study, led by Rita Issa of University College London, is published today in the open-access journal PLOS Climate. It looks at the role of heat in human […]

Scholar scoops prestigious science innovation fellowship

Freja Ekman has been named one of the 2023 class of Hertz Fellows as the prestigious fellowship celebrates its 60th year. The 15 fellowships in applied science, engineering and mathematics are awarded by Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, a non-profit organisation for innovators in science and technology. Winners will have their graduate studies funded for […]

Scholar hosts first UN communications technology access meeting in India

Gates Cambridge Scholar Pradipta Biswas has hosted a UN meeting on improving access to communications technology – the first ever held in India. The meeting of ITU-T Study Group 9 (SG-9) on “Broadband Cable and Television/Audiovisual content transmission and integrated broadband cable networks”  was held in May at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru […]