The following excerpt was taken from text written in 1973 by Margaret Rawson, a founder of the Jemicy School, and revised in 2004 by the Board of Trustees.
A school should be designed for its students, their present happy growth, and their soundly based future effectiveness. A school is established as a group in which people are taught or led to learn, but it is as individuals that they learn through experiencing group life and developing unique personal competencies and understanding of their world.
Just as in Aldous Huxley’s words, “It is no good knowing about the taste of strawberries out of a book,” so each student needs to experience for himself the worlds of city and country, of nature and human culture. These become part of him through all his senses, through emotional and spiritual appreciation and responsible involvement in all the world about and within him, and by the active process of the ordered observation, problem solving, and critical thinking which we call intellectual functioning. Each person is born with a distinctive combination of potentialities on which, by the time she comes to school, a unique set of experiences has been at work making her a separate individual, different from all others. At the same time, she is a member of the human family, with certain basic physical, emotional, and spiritual characteristics and needs, which she shares with all of us. It is this that makes society both necessary and possible. A school life that promotes the healthy, vigorous, joyful growth of its students should provide a well-planned physical setting and general program. Such dependable security gives a firm foundation and a stable framework within which each student can live a cooperative and rewarding social life while she is developing from dependent childhood into self-reliant adolescence and adulthood.