PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

What If?

What if school began with a different question? Not “What do we want children to know?” But: “Who might these children become if we helped them discover who they already are?” Every child who walks into a classroom carries something that no test can measure. Wonder. Imagination. The capacity to love. And a mind filled with questions.

Why is the sky blue? Why do people fight? Why can't everybody be happy? What makes someone good? What would happen if...? Children do not arrive at school empty, waiting for adults to pour knowledge into them. They arrive already alive—with curiosity, imagination, feelings, dreams, fears, and an almost endless capacity to discover.

And yet, somewhere along the way, many children begin to ask fewer questions. Perhaps it happens when they discover that some answers are called right and others wrong. Perhaps it happens when they become afraid of making mistakes. Perhaps it happens when they learn that the teacher's answer is more important than their own. Little by little, some children begin to believe that being smart means knowing the answers rather than knowing how to ask good questions.

But what if school could be different? What if a child could say, “I don't know,” without embarrassment? What if imagination were not a distraction from learning, but a doorway into it? What if mistakes were welcomed—not because mistakes are good in themselves, but because they mean someone is trying? What if children learned mathematics, science, history, and language—and also learned how to listen, how to disagree without hurting one another, how to understand another person's feelings, and how to love themselves without believing themselves better than anyone else? What if children were encouraged to discover their own gifts instead of constantly being compared with one another? What if they learned that their worth did not depend upon a grade? What if they discovered that there was something wonderful about simply being themselves?

Those questions gave birth to the School of Two Thousand Smiles. It was never intended to produce two thousand identical children. Quite the opposite. It was created to help two thousand young people become more completely themselves. The adults in the school had a different job from the teachers many of us remember. They were not simply dispensers of information. They were guides, listeners, encouragers, and fellow travelers. Among them was Sam. Sam was a counselor, but the children soon discovered that Sam was something more. Sam had an unusual ability to listen to a child without immediately trying to fix the child.

And then there were Ella and Danny. They were fifth graders. They were curious and imaginative. Sometimes they were confused. Sometimes funny, stubborn, frightened, generous, or surprisingly wise. They were, in other words, children. They had no idea that they were about to become part of an experiment in what education might become. They did not know that some of their questions would lead to other questions. They did not know that they would sometimes disagree with one another. They did not know that they would discover things about themselves they had never imagined. And they certainly did not know that their experiences at school might change how they saw themselves, one another, and perhaps even the world.

They only knew that school was a beginning. And so is this story. It begins, as perhaps every real education begins, with a question. Not an answer. A question.

What if?