Our Wildwood, Summer 2021, Volume 46

FEATURE by Landis Green, Head of School

Looking Back on the Founding of Wildwood

“No single person is responsible for a path; instead, it is the sum of the actions of numerous people over a time that dates back to the distant past.” —GEOFF NICHOLSON, FROM THE FORWARD TO IN PRAISE OF PATHS

to teachers who brought the vision to the middle and upper school program to trustees who’ve made Wildwood School a part of their life’s work—there are definitely through lines. DIFFERENT BY DESIGN—THE EARLY YEARS Belle Mason was the first. A public school teacher who, in what now appears to have been a relatively naive moment, thought it’d be “interesting” to start a school. Belle had instincts about how children learn. She’d been introduced to an English school called Summerhill, where the operating principle was aligned with the student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach construct that became language central to Wildwood 30 years later when the 10 Common Principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) served as the framework for the introduction of the middle and upper school program. Longtime Wildwood employee Marcia Capparela described Summerhill’s founder as having had some “pretty radical ideas” at a time when most desks were in rows, material was memorized and regurgitated, and

Fifty years. There’s no shortage of information about Wildwood School after 50 years as a school and 20 as a K-12. Documents have been written, interviews published, reports drafted, and plans made. And yet I didn’t want to let this time—this moment in our school’s history—pass without talking with some of the people who’ve known the school over time, trying to capture some of the through lines of what gives Wildwood heart. For this article, I was especially interested in talking with some of those who were centrally involved in the years surrounding the founding of the school and then the expansion to K-12. It also seems right that we should capture the stories of founders and friends, teachers and trustees who’ve left a legacy at the school, all contributing their vision, their time, their work, and their resources to make Wildwood School possible. As Geoff Nicholson wrote, “No single person is responsible for a path; instead, it is the sum of the actions of numerous people over a time that dates back to the distant past.” Talking with dozens of people—from Belle Mason, one of the founders in 1971,

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