Thanks to the Academy for the Love of Learning for their annual grant to Friends of Creation Spirituality for helping to make YELLAWE a reality.

Vision and Methods and Goals for YELLAWE

(c) Friends of Creation Spirituality

Submitted by Dr. Matthew Fox & Theodore Richards

The overall Vision of YELLAWE is, bluntly, to supplement the exam-driven definitions of education with a system that is more student-friendly, one that does not define education as an infinite amount of exams that please quantitatively driven bureaucrats, but that elicits the joy of learning and the wonder of learning from the students.  In YELLAWE we desire to reinvent education from the inner city out.  And this means attacking the issues of dropping out and of meaninglessness head on.

It is not only students who find themselves as odds with the No Child Left Behind definition of education but many teachers and parents as well.  Learning is meant to be a joy as well as work.  Students learn in very different ways—some by exams and papers and texts—but many through their bodies, imaginations, hands and story telling—and given today’s new technologies there are multiple fresh ways to tell stories and the youth are quite at home with these languages.  A teacher in Napa said to me one day: “I love teaching; I am a great teacher.  And I am quitting.  And every other good teacher in my district is quitting.  We cannot stomach the current definition of education, that of giving countless exams.  This is not the reason we became teachers.  We are hurting along with so many of our students.  We became teachers to bring alive the learning capacities of the kids”

In addition to exciting the awe and joy of learning, YELLAWE has proven itself useful for solving a very basic issue in today’s educational world: That of dropouts.  A recent study found that 1.2 million American youth are dropping out of school annually—that is 7000 for every school day.  Dropping out means as a rule lacking skills to secure a good job.  It often means the next step is jail.  Currently, about 40% of state prison inmates are high school dropouts.  Gangs too are heavily populated by drop outs.  In the state of California alone, dropouts cost the state $46.4 billion over their lifetimes.  U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has drawn attention to this reality too when he says: “To get this economy back on track, we need to lower our high school dropout rates.  These students need an education, and our economy needs these students.”

II.  Methods.  How do we lower high school dropout rates?  YELLAWE has been a two-year pilot project associated with Oasis Charter high school in downtown Oakland, California.  Oasis has drawn heavily for its student enrollment from students who are dropouts or were tending to be such.  YELLAWE has worked with 56 of these students.  In a recent survey of students in the YELLAWE program, 100% of the YELLAWE students said they wanted to stay in school—and continue taking the YELLAWE course.