Elizabeth Hall, 95, Is Dead; Began Innovative College
Thursday, July 21st, 2005
Elizabeth Hall, 95, Is Dead; Began Innovative College: “Elizabeth Blodgett Hall concluded that bored high school students should be sent straight to college and started Simon’s Rock College to prove the point.”
I highly recommend reading this article. Elizabeth Hall’s innovative ideas about the transition between high school and college have had a profound effect on Bard, Simon’s Rock, and many other colleges.
(Via NYT > Education.)
I count myself among the nation’s most fortunate “disabled learners” who spent two glorious years attending Simon’s Rock of Bard College in 1983-1985. Recovering from the academic tortures of “failing” to meet educational standards within my local public schools, viewed as a subversive who dared to challenge teacher’s views, Simon’s Rock became a haven for many gifted disabled learners who would thrive in the Blodgett-Hall Laboratory of human and social potentialing reforms. Ms Hall’s was the original innovator of the collaborative learning community.
Her vision was superbly implemented and catalyzed by an exemplary cadre of professors, adminstrators and support personnel, each of whom were devoted to the youth mind’s unlimited potential, unfettered by delimited social views, undermining community development and global understanding.
Today as the world’s balance literally rests in the hands of a few who have successfully led the nation into a big sleep, the ability to overcome the prevailing views and acheive a relative peace may only come around again through an aggressive social campaign for early academic pursuits. Hence, Ms. Blodgett Hall was not only visionary, she may very well have been prophetic.
Her legacy lives on in the many Simon’s Rock devotees who work against odds to guard the innate potential of all student’s “At Promise” for academic achievement, social transcendence and humankind’s interdependent development.
Each day in the highschool where I work as a special educator I know I was given refuge so that others would one day have the same benefit and thus I work to pass this legacy on. I use many of the same models I learned in the writing and thinking workshop to overcome my dyslexia, dysgraphia and dysnomia with students I teach in special education. And while they don’t know it, I attempt to replicate Simon’s Rock educational values and strategies within their inclusive inner city high school, encouraging them to doubt, disagree and demand excellence of their educators to so as to ensure their love of Kafka is tantamount to their love Cold Play.
My prayers and expressed gratitude goes out to her extended family and community who each in their way supported the life of an exemplary educator, visionary and role model.