School Founded by Blue Man Group

By Shelley • November 20th, 2009

ABCsBLUE SCHOOL | THE BLUE MAN GROUP | blue paint | Matt Goldman

The ABCs of F-U-N

by Larry Dobrow

A school founded by the Blue Man Group turns learning into child’s play.

A PERFORMANCE BY THE BLUE MAN GROUP employs screens, projections, oddball props, and, most famously, buckets of blue paint. There are satiric commentaries on science and technology, always wordless and usually set to an irregular percussive heartbeat. Shaving cream and the remote propulsion thereof often figure prominently in the proceedings.

So it comes as a surprise to learn that the project currently capturing the group’s imagination has less to do with pulsating fractals and more to do with basic fractions. In September 2008, the three Blue Men — Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink — partnered with a trio of education and developmental experts to open Blue School, a New York charter school for 62 prekindergarten and kindergarten children located on the second floor of a new building in Manhattan’s East Village.

The school prioritizes student-led inquiry over rote learning, face-to-face conflict resolution over time-outs in the corner. Its lofty goal, as outlined in the school’s mission statement, is “to cultivate creative, joyful, and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.”

This may sound a touch hippie-dippy-ish to some, especially those weaned on neatly aligned rows of desks and reading/writing/arithmetic curricula. And it’s not like the Blue School comes cheap: A year’s tuition costs $27,300 for the elementary school, while the preschool program ranges from $4,200 to $14,700. But any and all skepticism about the school’s style melts away when you’re amid its gaggle of students, who on this bright Friday are knee-deep in some serious learning about pirates.

Today, the four-year-olds will learn how to sequence the letters of the alphabet through an endeavor involving treasure maps. All will create pirate ships of their own, including one with a wonderfully makeshift plank forged from a pair of chopsticks. Later, the ships will be waterproofed and then launched armada-style during what teacher Dina Hamaoui calls “a big yahoo in the park.”

In the afternoon, the students will log some restorative minutes in the therapeutic sand area. They’ll gab via the colored, illuminated speaking tubes that snake from one end of the building to the other along the ceiling. Perhaps they’ll do some yoga in the padded world o’ whimsy that is the Wonder Room, which boasts a small rock wall and the type of light-up floor commonly associated with discos. And they’ll do it all with a curious glint in their eyes that is rarely seen nowadays outside the presence of a Harry Potter tome or a Wii.

“It’s important to me that they learn the alphabet,” says Brad Choyt, the head of school. “But it’s just as important to me how they learn it.” (He says this, of course, as we sit on chairs sized for three-year-olds.)

The idea for the Blue School arose when Goldman, Stanton, and Wink began having kids of their own. While they weren’t actively displeased with the existing options for preschoolers, they weren’t blown away by them either. The problem, they thought, was that classroom strategies and curricula hadn’t kept up-to-date with recent learnings in everything from philosophy to neuroscience.

As Renee Rollieri, a Blue School cofounder, a visual artist and arts therapist, and the mom of a student, puts it, “We became parents and we saw what was out there, but nobody was paying enough attention to social and emotional learning. None of the schools prioritized the way people treat each other. Education, especially now, needs to be responsive to the culture we’re in.”

Goldman condenses the thinking behind the Blue School more succinctly, saying, “It was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea. What if school were fun?’ ”

THE BLUE SCHOOL started as a 12-child playgroup but morphed into something more formal once the founders realized that their creative/collaborative approach to learning resonated with both kids and their parents. They did, as Goldman admits, recognize that “perception could be a bit of an uphill battle” and that “some people are more comfortable with a certain model.” So in true Blue Man form — Goldman and his partners remain active students of everything from film to vaudeville — the founders set about refining their ideas with a number of education and child- development experts. The participation of and endorsements from individuals like creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson, psychologist Larry Cohen, and neuroscientist David Rock did much to quell any doubts. One school year in, the Blue School is an associate member of the National Association of Independent Schools.

Parents? Either they get it or they don’t. “If there are 60 people in the room when we give a talk, 20 tune out when we admit that our strategy isn’t to get their son or daughter into an Ivy League school,” Goldman cracks. Nonetheless, parents are encouraged to be active participants in most Blue School programming. “I know every name of every parent and sibling,” chirps teacher Mara Pauker proudly.

Along those lines, the Blue School is all about involvement, especially when it comes to fostering students’ budding entrepreneurial instincts. “There was a sense when I was going to school in the ’60s that you could actually learn all of American history, but we can’t just teach kids facts anymore,” Goldman says. “The amount of information on this planet is doubling every two or three years. The best thing you can do is teach kids how to learn on their own about the things they want to learn.”

Choyt agrees. “Look at how the workforce is evolving — the jobs that our students will have, they don’t exist yet. They’ll be using technologies that don’t exist yet,” he explains. “What we want to do is give them the tools they’ll need. We want to install a love of learning and the ability to do collaborative problem solving.”

So while the children are treated to elements of a traditional curriculum, they also spend time adjusting their placements on the school’s feeling grid (as of 11:20 this morning, five identify themselves as happy, one as silly, and none as either angry or tired) and sorting out their set-tos on the peace bench (which came in handy in September, when school resumed and a few of the children were having transition issues).

Clearly a different set of rules is implemented here. If there’s a child-size desk in the building, it’s kept well hidden. Most visitors traipse to and fro without shoes. And while the Blue School displays its students’ handiwork as proudly as does any other school, it doesn’t hide the evidence when the finished product is slightly disturbing — like the contribution of Zachary, four, to the school’s “Dream Catcher” exhibit: “My family turned to blood.”

“If there’s a conflict, we don’t deny what’s going on,” says communication coordinator Ashley Hughes. “We give them the tools to deal with it. I’m not sure we give children enough credit for their ability to express how they’re feeling.”

The Blue School added a first-grade class in September, which jumped overall enrollment to 90, and hopes to expand by one grade per year. Rollieri wants to see the school move toward what she calls an “open-source” entity, one whose genetic code can be accessed and incorporated by public schools, charter schools, and anyone else.

The main challenge, predictably enough for an organization based in New York City, is real estate: Next year, some children will relocate to another building a few blocks away. Also, Goldman bemoans the school’s quick growth spurt, especially since he and the other founders had hoped to, in his words, “transcend the crazy anxiety” felt by NYC-area parents attempting to place their young children in the best possible institutions. “Sadly, we’ve become the thing we were rebelling against, with 200 kids for 15 open spaces,” he says.

At the same time, the 30-odd kids present on this April day seem genuinely thrilled with the process of learning. They might go home with dirt on their socks or traces of shaving cream on their shirts (yes, that Blue Man staple has found its way into the classroom). But there will almost certainly be smiles on their faces.

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