This school’s primary focus will be the pursuit of all natural knowledge. For “nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known.” (Emerson 67) The school will allow students to pursue their current interests and will not restrain them from leisurely reflection on their own experience. This may require a personal redefinition of productivity. A student must be productive, but only by his own standards. Productivity can be defined as any alteration of oneself, by any means, which has been intentionally induced by the student. The school discourages strict schedules and any form of extrinsic motivation. The school finds it most important for students to “believe their own thought” for it “is genius.” (Emerson 19) Students are encouraged to be vocal and “speak their latent conviction.” (Emerson 19).
Amenability is prohibited, students must never “surrender their culture and liberty.” (Emerson 21) Contentious debates must only resolve of their own volition. A debate may not seize merely because of the termination of the school’s operating hours, true interests have no temporal or constrictions otherwise. Although students are encouraged to speak their conviction with conviction, they most respect those whom disagree with them. Students must understand that “to be great is to be misunderstood.” (Emerson 25) Therefore, students may criticize other’s arguments and premises, however, they may never use others’ candor as a weapon. If students are at all dubious to speak their mind, they will not achieve their maximum potential.
Ambivalence and the vacillation of opinion is not discouraged. Arguments’ purpose are not to prove a side (often to other individuals), but rather to understand the argument and realize the student’s position. Students must practice honesty. For in character and opinion, it is alike their interest...and all men’s...to live in truth.” (Emerson 31) Students must be comfortable with both social and intellectual rejection. If they are to practice the above precepts, they may very well provide their “friends pain.” (Emerson 31) This is an inevitability of social nonconformity; genuine honesty is difficult to practice and tolerate. Rather than impose morality upon the students, they must learn to obey their own personal morality.
The school’s mission is to promote individual learning that is intrinsically motivated. The school achieves this by providing its students with the means to teach themselves. This may be considered an indirect socratic method. This allows the prosperity of two qualities that society instills in its members: independence and autonomy. The strong, illusionary conviction that these two qualities are currently possessed by the multitude in fact allows for the abuse of these unalienable rights. The school provides students with a true taste of these two entitlements, enabling them to understand when they are being exploited by their tendency to the false-consensus effect.
The individual is powerless against the masses unless trained to fight. The individual must be taught to be introspective and critical but not self-doubting. Confidence is a crucial factor in nonconformity, and as many pupils will obtain this confidence through their peers and level of social acceptance, they must be trained otherwise. The school’s objective is to provide students with such self-confidence, and alternative means of obtaining it if necessary.
Individuals will receive knowledge, truth, intellect through the pursuit of them. They will search for such things in the natural world, the science of nature, not of humanity. The school is centered around the individual, and its relationship with nature and its understanding of this relationship.