P.A.L.’s Pedagogy

 “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”  ~ Mark Twain 

 America is in crisis.  Our crisis is one of heart, mind, and soul, particularly amongst the young.   Given that the necessary answers are generally unavailable within popular culture, the media, and the educational establishment, how and what must we now teach?  There are glaring questions:  Why are today’s students lagging far behind their predecessors despite more funding than ever?  How did they become so woefully ignorant of their heritage?  What happened to the core elements of being a child:  curiosity, dreams, and innocence?  Since pop culture mantras incessantly engender gaping voids in thought and reason, P.A.L. steps in to fill the void. 

P.A.L. employs a one-of-a-kind experiential method wherein the students make the necessary discoveries.  Learning, if it is to be lasting and real, must encourage the development of a comprehensive worldview ~ for it is this larger meta-narrative that generates the essential zeal and subsequent coherency.  To be clear, a  “worldview” is the lens through which we see everything else around us.  How then is our educational establishment helping young people to see?  C.S. Lewis reminds the postmodern world, “To see through everything is the same as seeing nothing.”  Rather than unfocused meanderings, meaningful education must address the basic human dilemma:  What has gone wrong with the world, and what can we do to fix it? 

At P.A.L., our charge is to educate in a way that recognizes this fundamental state of being while stimulating the cognitive process through Socratic inquiry.  Students must be taught to critically evaluate their knee-jerk presumptions in search of a solid foundation upon which consciously to build their lives.  Fortunately, this is not such a difficult task.  Children come into the world picking up every foreign object, studying every previously unknown face, and asking every conceivable question.  Re-inspiring this “passion to know” is our perpetual aim; thus, each day revolves around questions that are both personal and profound:  Who am I?  What am I?  Where am I?  Why am I?  These questions and the activities that answer them combine to form our comprehensive strategy.  P.A.L. stimulates the natural curiosity with which we are born. 

We discover a part of ourselves by knowing the facts of our nation’s heroic struggles.  Knowledge of history is vital to liberty’s survival.  In order to meet this challenge, young people must realize that there are indeed facts to be found.  P.A.L. explores our founding documents and rich heritage by using exciting games, adventures, and simulations.  In today’s classrooms, students might rightly ask, “So what if John Hancock was first to sign The Declaration?  What difference does it make to me or anyone else?”  Bits and pieces of information are not meaningful if a student is unable to see their relationship to the bigger picture.  How is she to fully appreciate today’s opportunities if she has no understanding of yesterday’s struggles?  Students need foundations on which to construct functional worldviews.  At P.A.L., students build with bricks and mortar.  Bricks are the facts; Mortar is the thinking process. 

By using The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution as textual foundations, P.A.L. is able to address questions related to personal meaning and purpose, as well as to examine the way we relate to one another ~ the way we fit into the greater historical context and the way principle forms our moral identity as a people.  Because P.A.L. is built upon these solid foundations, students reach for the core virtues of the program ~ the founding principles of America.  As in 1776, these truths become self-evident as students delve into the four Cs of Citizenship:  Clarity • Compassion • Courage • Commitment.  The Constitution takes this moral cornerstone of The Declaration and creates an enduring blueprint for our Democratic Republic.  The starting point is quite revolutionary, “We the people.”