Happy Friday, everyone.
During your time at our organization, you've likely encountered a number of our core principles. At Guidepost, we talk about things like "guide and be guided" and "earn the trust of parents". At ATI, you may see adolescents explore ideas such as "the love of work" or "the courage to live wholeheartedly". In your PMI training, you learn about foundational Montessori maxims like "freedom within structure" or "follow the child". And I hope you've read about Higher Ground principles like "mission without martyrdom" or "practical idealism".
Each of these principles informs and expresses our pedagogy and philosophy, and each of them is an important and fundamental pillar of our work. They each drive our work to enable children across the world to realize their human potential as knowledge-guided, value-oriented, efficacious beings.
But I don’t think any of them go all the way down. It is important in our work that we regularly go down to the bedrock, to the deepest idea that makes us who we are as an organization.
For us, that idea is that the individual human life, fully lived, is an end in itself. This core principle is deeper than our current operations, deeper than our core values, deeper even than our Montessori pedagogy--it is at the very foundation of our worldview, the bedrock that everything rests upon.
Since we have started a new year, I want to encourage you all to take 30 minutes to revisit and rededicate yourselves to this bedrock idea, which I explain and explore in the linked talk below. Most of you hopefully watched it during your onboarding, but given how central it is to who we are, I'll hope you'll find some time to watch it again, to contemplate, and to connect your work to the theme that animates our shared mission.
Ray Girn
Founder and CEO, Higher Ground Education
"See in the adult the children that they were."