Mastering The Art of Choice

Agnes Martin, Gratitude.

Agnes Martin, the famous abstract painter, once said that it took her twenty years to make good art. She was a prolific painter, one who sat down with her craft every single day, and yet it took her nearly two decades of solid work to create something she thought was worthy. Martin was notorious for cutting up canvases that did not meet with her approval, slicing through them with knives or scissors. By what standard were these works unacceptable? Was there a certifying agency that declared that only particular standards of artwork were acceptable? Did Martin have a mentor or teacher who stood over her canvases and told her which ones were not up to par? Of course not. Martin was, in many ways, creating a whole new genre of art and so there were no other standards against which to measure herself. She simply knew what she wanted to do and knew, for a fact, when she had not done it yet.

It is our belief at Alpine Valley School that all learning is the same. Children are trying things out. They are making music, crafting sentences, solving problems, and holding their work up against their own personal standards. When a young person decides to put on a play, no one tells her what a successful play looks like, or how she will know when she’s gotten the best performance possible from one of her actors - only she decides. She experiments with different things freely, away from the evaluative gaze of an “educator”., with the full support of a mixed-age community. She alone gets to decide when she has done what she set out to do, and when she hasn’t.

Malcolm Gladwell suggested that it takes 10,000 hours of practice in order to achieve mastery on any subject. Students at Alpine Valley School are free to engage with their interests as deeply and often as they want to. They are also free to pick up a subject, determine that it isn’t for them, and put it back down again. The choice is theirs. We believe that with enough choice, enough freedom, that deciding what to pursue, and how to go about it becomes a skill unto itself. By the time they graduate, students at our school will have amassed far more than 10,000 hours of decision-making, not to mention the time they choose to dedicate to any other particular skill.

Whether they elect to spend all day drawing, doing math, crafting a digital world in Minecraft, writing stories, or playing tag, our students are spending all day every day deciding for themselves, a skill that we believe to be an art unto itself.