Seeing the Unseen

photo by Elizabeth Douglas

This winter as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway on the way to school, my boys and I would sometimes attempt to spot wildlife.  Winter isn’t a very good time to see animals in the mountains of Western North Carolina, but we persisted and were occasionally rewarded with a glimpse of the odd squirrel or crow.  I wonder what we would have seen had we parked the car and walked that five mile stretch on the Mountains to Sea Trail that parallels the Parkway?  Or, what would we have seen if we just wandered through the woods, off the road and off the trail, through the leafless blackberry brambles and among the dark green rhododendron, peering around the gray trunks splotched with white?  Would we have seen more wildlife?  Would we have seen something unexpected that might have created some new synapses in our brains that would cause us to view the world in a slightly different manner?

Students need to get off the road and off the trail.  Most schools are all too predictable.  Our daily schedules with learning boxed up nicely into particular disciplines make it all too easy for students to pass through their education without really looking beyond three feet on either side of the road.  

We know that today’s students face an unpredictable future where they will bounce from job to job, perhaps holding as many as ten or fifteen different jobs during a lifetime.  Futurists claim that by 2025 over half the jobs that our current students will compete for don’t even exist today.  In order to thrive in this world, our students need to have an adventurous spirit; their thinking needs to be nimble and adaptable to new and changing conditions; their minds need to be trained in a way that frees them to take mental risks.   

We are creating a school that supports this type of learning and thinking.  The faculty in the Middle School at Carolina Day School is constantly working to provide experiences for our students to develop a mindset that forces them to see things that others don’t, not necessarily because they have better vision, but because our students relish the opportunity to walk off the trail and know how to seek and value the unseen.