Abstract I identify the central problem of the Orchard Gardens School as children attempting to collectively create a shared originary culture of learning, but having their attempts unintentionally sabotaged by aspects of their socio-school milieu. However, I argue that effective educating begins when a safe haven is created, continues when students are taught to create and use mind screens, and becomes enriched when students create their own learning projects through large music creating groups, science and mathematical applications, and generally through beginning to enter non discursive linguistic domains of drama, music, dance, and art.

1. An Essay Critiquing the Roxbury, Massachusetts’ Orchard Gardens K-8 School
[By Charles H. Settles 3/06; revised 6/16/06]
By
Settles,
255 Massachusetts Avenue, Apt. 808
Boston, MA 02115
csettles_1@verizon.net
617-267-3864
Abstract
I identify the central problem of the Orchard Gardens School
as children attempting to collectively create a shared originary culture
of learning, but having their attempts unintentionally sabotaged by
aspects of their socio-school milieu. However, I argue that effective
educating begins when a safe haven is created, continues when students are
taught to create and use mind screens, and becomes enriched when students
create their own learning projects through large music creating groups,
science and mathematical applications, and generally through beginning to
enter non discursive linguistic domains of drama, music, dance, and art.

2. I
The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution….
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle
requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.1 Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Childhood is a time of
great need. Therefore, the
mission of the Orchard
Gardens’ School should be to
protect and nurture.2 Yet at
this point in time (2/27/06),
the Orchard Gardens School
is under great pressure. This
pressure comes from
Leadership not aligning with
School Aspirations. The
Politicians say, “Improve
those test scores.” So, a fearful, but dedicated Principal will heavy handedly pressure her
Teachers to coercively mold vulnerable children to fit templates representing not open-ended
models of possible futures, but dead ends driven by narrowly defined visions.
We must understand that what unites a primarily American born monolingual Black,
and a largely bilingual Hispanic student body is a persistent cognitive anxiety.3 This
cognitive anxiety embeds an inhibiting effect of an idealized patriarchal family lineage. To
alleviate their cognitive anxiety, Orchard Gardens’ Students replicate imaginatively the
socio-cultural and class conditions surrounding their places of origin. But this originary ethos
under construction powerfully competes with worlds their socio-school milieu provides. In
conflict with a primarily female constructed learning environment, this replication incites in
students the fears surrounding an imaginary re-enactment of primal struggling involving
individual and group survival. The irruption into conscious memory of this fear driven
1
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/X00001A96/
cf. http://www.boston.k12.ma.us/schools/schname.asp ; school picture taken from
http://www.stullandlee.com/architecture/education/ogs.htm
3
A question for the reader is, “What social and cultural processes go into constituting a product called cognitive
anxiety?”
2
2

3. imaginary or primary process imagery results in students withdrawing into more infantile
emotional-states.4
However, to attend the needs of its students, the Orchard Gardens’ School is very rich
in instructional materials and faculty. And it has a Principal who values the latest sciencebased teaching techniques. Yet classroom Teachers perceive their Principal’s standpoint as
determined by masses of detail which don’t readily translate into viable instruction. In fact,
many Teachers see their Principal’s effort as counterproductive. But, from the point of view
of this essay, both Principal and Teachers, although dedicated, remain blind and deaf to the
adaptive needs of their students. In this light, then, what form might a viable model for
learning take for the Orchard Gardens’ children?
Articulating a viable educational vision for Orchard Gardens would mean resolving
some basic student boundary clarification issues. Students at this school are heavily burdened
by legacies of poverty and hunger whose holds on them must be relaxed. More specifically,
these children feel a heavy kinship responsibility to those left behind impoverished and
hungry. Moreover, these children are confused about which aspects of their socio-cultural
heritage will prove valuable for them in the future and which aspects must be relinquished if
they are to have futures. All of these issues demand resolution if the Orchard Gardens’
students are to adapt successfully to American Society. So the Orchard Gardens’ School
faculty and Principal must become sensitive to the adaptive needs of children whose basic
senses of Self are distorted by socio-cultural contextual issues.
Collectively creating viable socio-cultural identity is the main adaptive challenge for
Orchard Gardens’ students.5 In fact, the richness of America’s not yet determined future
depends on the viability of this collectively created socio-cultural identity of the Orchard
4
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:NARTDLAw47gJ:www.psychedeliclibrary.org/mogar.htm+primary+process+imagery&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=124
“We find primary process thinking in conscious subjects either out of strength or out of weakness. In
the former case, it is more likely to appear in a playful or esthetic frame of reference, accompanied by pleasant
affect. If, on the other hand, primary thinking breaks through the usual defenses uninvited and unwanted, the
subject may feel anxious or threatened and is likely to act defensively;” http://www.apsa.org/japa/524/BrakelP.1131-1161.pdf : A comprehensive study validating primary process thinking;
http://www.kovcomp.co.uk/wordstat/RID.html :“The Regressive Imagery Dictionary (Martindale, 1975,1990)
is a content analysis coding scheme designed to measure primordial vs. conceptual thinking.”
5
See entry 1 in appendix B for an explanation of how socio-cultural identity is collectively created:
cf. http://www.unm.edu/~devalenz/handouts/sociocult.html --“A key feature of this emergent view of human
development is that higher order functions develop out of social interaction;” and
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/methodology/socio.shtml --“One of the greatest importances
of communication is when an idea has to be formulated and expressed, sharing the idea
among essential partners who will test their assumptions,” and
http://www.nald.ca/province/nb/tesl/guide3.htm
3

4. Gardens’ students. If these kids get a lousy education, America will be in trouble. But the
success of this identity-project strongly depends on the Orchard Gardens’ Principal. She is
charged with creating a school environment which promotes cultural criticism, and the
identification and treatment of the effects of harmful culture borne cognitive structures.6
At Orchard Gardens, mental processes of an anomalous nature interfere with student
learning. As I suggested above, these anomalous mental processes become activated by the
culture shock of students encountering a female dominated learning domain. In response to
this culture shock, students refocus their attention away from the adaptive requirements of
face-to-face interaction with other members of their learning community, and towards Id
dominated worlds of primary process thinking. Furthermore, overcoming the effects of this
cultural shock by getting students to re-attend to the promises of their learning community is
the raison d’etre for Orchard Gardens Teaching.
By their choice of membership in the Orchard Gardens’ Learning Community, these
students become the occasion for the playing out of a fundamental conflict between a
Principal and her Teaching Faculty. A strongly detail-oriented Principal has a vision for a
feedback corrected science-informed instruction, but her Teachers are confronted with
student thinking that resists alignment both to their teaching, and to the categories of their
Principal’s evaluative and instructional rubrics. Elsewhere, I touched upon the preferred
school role for the Principal, and here I will outline the proper role for Teachers. First, I note
these Teachers seem too self-absorbed since they self-confidently and strongly identify with
their degrees and levels of professionalism; but these Teachers neglect becoming aware that
their core function involves nurturance and protection, and this means loosening up with an
understanding of the psychology of bicultural adaptation, and the role nonverbal and non
discursive messages play in human communication.7,8
To re-state, belief-structures that interfere with participation in knowledge-based
communities work against Orchard Gardens’ students forming a learning community. And
6
cf. http://www.lib.calpoly.edu/staff/fvuotto/bus_402/winkelman.html
Cultural Shock and Adaptation By Michael Winkelman—“Resolution of cultural shock is best
achieved by a proactive cognitive orientation.” See also,
http://0-muse.jhu.edu.ilsprod.lib.neu.edu/journals/theory_into_practice/v042/42.4curran.pdf “Teachers need to
be sensitive to the increased cognitive and affective demands when one operates in a second language and plan
their classroom management accordingly.”
7
http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3021&context=postprints
“Bicultural identity integration (BII): Components and psychosocial antecedents “
8
cf. Katz, Susan A. & Judith A. Thomas. Teaching Creatively By Working The Word—Language, Music,
And Movement. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1992.
4

5. the Principal’s primary duty should be to create an educational milieu which would protect
students from these counterproductive belief-structures. To this end, the provision of A
SAFE HAVEN for students IS STEP ONE if these children are to successfully encounter
DESTINY.
In a safe haven, the Orchard Gardens’ students would collectively contemplate the
resources of their life-experiences. They could then transmute these experiences within
effective instructional environments, and with the aid of understanding Teachers, helpful
Scientists from Boston University’s new Bio-Lab, and Specialists in large-scale musical
productions, and non discursive languages.9 In the end, these Orchard Gardens children
would collectively pursue interests in artistically and mathematically exploring and
scientifically researching the dimensions of the human brain/mind/consciousness.
The Orchard Gardens’ students are children, but life subjects them to the promise of a
harsh and unforgiving world. And whereas elsewhere in this report, I questioned the degree
of sensitivity of Orchard Gardens’ Faculty and Principal towards students whose selfformational processes are distorted by embedded socio-cultural challenges, I also touched
upon what must be done to help these children—viz., the Principal must promote policies that
broaden the cultural and social foundations of her school’s instructional mission, and her
Teachers must provide instruction the mastery of which should result in students creating
cognitive screens10 as well as mastering content. In turn, these cognitive barriers should
work to filter out or deny the attribution of reality to culture-based knowledge-structures that
adversely influence the Teachers’ abilities to teach and the students’ abilities to learn.
9
cf. http://opiniononreligion.blogspot.com/2006/01/non-discursive-language.html
“Non-discursive language comes in the form of images, music, and drama: forms that can convey
feeling or experience in a complex, non-linear way;” http://www.bsu.edu/classes/bauer/hpmused/langer.html
:“Discursive Forms and Presentational Forms;”
http://www.aare.edu.au/02pap/wri02327.htm : “Multi-Modality in a New Key: The
Significance of the Arts in Research and Education--Multi-modality and the use of non-verbal symbolic
expression often is suppressed in institutionalised education, due to the social and cultural dominance of literal
language and written modes of expression.”
10
“Cognitive screens” or “mind screens” are continuously re-visited in my analysis. First, they appear as the
Principal “is charged with creating a school environment which promotes cultural criticism, and the
identification and treatment of harmful culture borne cognitive structures.” Next, they appear as “The
Principal’s primary duty is … to create an educational milieu which would protect students from …
counterproductive belief-structures. So, fundamentally, “mind screens” function to protect children from or
help them “overcome the effects of cultural shock." But, “cognitive screens” are products that must be
constructed in students’ own streams of consciousness in response to the proper school environment as
provided through the Principal, and Teachers whose teaching is informed by “an understanding of a psychology
of bicultural adaptation, and the role nonverbal and non discursive messages play in human communication.
The thing that students take from this I have designated as “mind screens” or “cognitive screens.” These are
analogous to software that protects kids from the content of harmful web sites.
5

6. In counterpoint to her faculty, the Orchard Gardens’ Principal views professional
success in terms of a “taught” curriculum. But neither this “taught” curriculum nor the legal
curriculum has any bearing on effectively educating her students. As I have shown, an
effective educating begins when a safe haven is created, continues when students are taught
to create and use mind screens, and becomes enriched when students create their own
learning projects through large music creating groups, science and mathematical applications,
and generally through beginning to enter non discursive linguistic domains of drama, music,
dance, and art. But a too heavily detailed “taught” curriculum pushed by the Principal reacts
against the effects of the legal curriculum by subjugating expressive student behavior,
especially that of boys. Further, this subjugation incites student outbursts because of
unappealing instructional material that exceeds students’ frustration levels, and does not
encourage their natural inclinations.
Thus the only thing keeping Orchard Gardens’ students from performing at the
highest levels is instruction not aligned with student educational needs. Incorporating forms
of non discursive communication in instruction, and providing an educational
environment that helps kids identify and neutralize the cognitively inhibiting effects of
stereotypes is all these kids need. But what is so amazing is that so little is required to
release such amazing levels of scientific and artistic creativity.
II
I will conclude my report with a detailed analysis of the Orchard Gardens
School’s natural grade-sequence progression:
Kindergarten
Kindergarten is that wonderful time for meeting lots of other kids, but instead of a
time for learning as a phenomenological elaboration of spontaneous play, kindergarten, here,
is regimentation imposed for learning subject-matter—too much arithmetic, but too little
natural world geometry, and too much “saying words, but too little talking with each other
about what we read/learn.”
First Grade
First grade children collectively give birth to essential modes of relating, but have the
educationally relevant group-based value-systems they endeavor to collectively create
unintentionally sabotaged by teachers who de-value imaginary companionship, and its strong
tie to the non discursive symbolism in drama, music, art, and dance.
6

7. Second Grade
If enlightened teachers were to teach conceptually unified content which builds on
primary process thinking while using resources which insulate students from the unintended
side effects of cognitively inhibiting teacher-evoked stress patterns that are based on the
inadequate recognition and understanding of culture-based modes of thought suppression,
then second grade students would not suffer the huge amount of intellectual damage they
currently experience; helpful here would be strong exposure to children’s literature, some in
languages other than English, about all of the world’s people.
Third Grade
Absent their second grade damage, third graders would be ready for a realistic picture
of the world and things they can do about it. For American born children of color, and other
non mainstream children, this would mean an emphasis on current affairs, and “If I were
type-stories;” for example, if I were President Bush/a CDC scientist studying bird flu, I
would…; this would engender ability to understand the outer world, and a capability to aspire
to greatness.
Fourth Grade
In the 4th grade, Orchard Gardens’ children encounter another big problem. Here
students wrongly prepared in their earlier school years cry out for relevance, but get
suspensions or detention instead; these students need aspects of a “peace curriculum,”
organized group games that teach good sportsmanship, and a shifting from rational or
discovery approaches to teaching science to experimental laboratory science, especially the
life sciences.
Fifth Grade
Fifth grade has students who have almost totally identified with dysfunctional aspects
of both their ethnic and street cultures because School never helped them create mind screens
for protection; these students need exposure to stereotypical information-structures, and how
one can protect oneself therefrom.
Sixth Grade
In the 6th grade, many angry students, especially boys, haven’t been taught to channel
aggression in healthy ways; kids who were poised to be taught, for example, the value of
drumming to band play, instead, learned the advantages of gang-membership to self-survival.
7

8. Seventh Grade
Seventh grade should see kids take the group-solidarity values they established in first
grade into the realms of community service, but with them they must also carry open
perspectives derived from their third grade exposure to children’s literature and non
discursive languages; otherwise they will have nothing to give.
Eighth Grade
And finally, I have arrived at the 8th grade after which Orchard Gardens’ Students
graduate. A helpful rite of passage for 8th graders would be the writing of an exit essay. 8th
graders need to affirm that they will eventually take responsibility for something or
somebody. Failure to compose their exit essays whether from rejecting responsibility or
having inadequate compositional skills means future lives of confinement—in an
impoverished community, in alcoholism, in teen pregnancy, in self-abusive drug-behavior, or
in jail.
8

9. APPENDIX
An Explanation of How Socio-Cultural Identity could be Collectively Created
In his book, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker (HarperCollins,
1995, pp. 35-36)Pinker reviews the dynamics of new language coming into
being. I argue an analogous process is at work among the students at the
Orchard Gardens’ school in their attempts to collectively create viable
socio-cultural identities:
Until recently there were no sign languages at all in
Nicaragua, because its deaf people remained isolated from
one another. When the Sandinista government took over in 1979
and reformed the educational system, the first schools for the
deaf were created. The schools focused on drilling the children
in lip reading and speech, and as in every case where that is
tried, the results were dismal. But it did not matter. On the
playgrounds and school buses the children were inventing their
own sign system, pooling the makeshift gestures that they used
with their families at home. Before long the system congealed
into what is now called the Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense (LSN).
Today LSN is used, with varying degrees of fluency, by
young deaf adults, aged seventeen to twenty-five, who developed
it when they were ten or older. Basically, it is a pidgin.
Everyone uses it differently, and the signers depend on
suggestive, elaborate circumlocutions rather than on a
consistent grammar.
But children like Mayela, who joined the school around the
age of four, when LSN was already around, and all the
pupils younger than her, are quite different. [author’s
italics]Their signing is more fluid and compact, and the
gestures are more stylized and less like a pantomime. In fact,
when their signing is examined close up, it is so different
from LSN that it is referred to by a different name,Idioma de
Signos Nicaraguense (ISN).... ISN appears to be a creole,
created in one leap when the younger children were exposed to
the pidgin signing of the older children.... ISN has spontaneously
standardized itself; all the young children sign
it in the same way. The children have introduced many
grammatical devices that were absent in LSN, and hence they rely
far less on circumlocutions. For example, an LSN (pidgin)
signer might make the sign for "talk to" and then point
from the position of the talker to the position of the hearer.
But an ISN (creole) signer modifies the sign itself, sweeping
it in one motion from a point representing the talker to a
point representing the hearer. This is a common device
in sign languages, formally identical to inflecting a verb
for agreement in spoken languages. Thanks to such
consistent grammar, ISN is very expressive. A child can
watch a surrealistic cartoon and describe its plot to another
child. The children use it in jokes, poems, narratives,
and life histories, and it is coming to serve as the glue
that holds the community together. A language has been
born before our eyes. [author’s italics]
9

10. I argue the students at Orchard Gardens have unique interpretations of their school,
and of the events and objects they experience there. Moreover, in a way analogous to how
deaf children in Nicaragua created a brand new language, Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense, I
postulate these various individual interpretations will become socially interactively merged
into one mainstream, which Orchard Gardens Students will create and maintain as their
chosen reality.11 This collective identity, I argue, will be born in the matrix of a non
discursive language/symbolism, and it will predispose children to lives of hope or despair
depending on the quality of the education they receive at the Orchard Gardens. After all,
these students do behaviorally affirm "Language is the fundamental mode of operation of
[their] ...being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of ... [their]
world;"12 this "linguistic consciousness" is their new Identity.
11
cf. Sharron, Avery. "The Mainstream of Consciousness: William James' Concept of the Stream of
Consciousness Sociologically Interpreted." A paper presented to the American Sociological Association
(September, 1982)
12
Gadamer, Hans-George. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and Edited by David L. Linge. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1977
10