Philosophy

Often when one strolls through the alternately gooey or dusty mess that isour playground we find that our overarching philosophy is lost in the daily muck.Sometimes our school looks like a circus. Often it is difficult to see the worthin allowing children to be covered from head to toe in brown paint. But we assertthat by creating an environment where the children are free to decorate the schooland themselves as they see fit, we are removing the false security of rules whichare adult created and adult enforced - which ultimately have very little to dowith anything other than tradition or etiquette. We are actually setting thechildren up for the extremely complicated and difficult task of self-regulationand self-discipline. If we allow the children the freedom to explore all thepossibilities that any given situation can offer, we are guiding them to a truersense of who they are and how they think about the world. Similarly to the seeminglyinsignificant and unrelated little dots in a pointillist painting, each day atthe Hutch joins with all the others to create an incredibly beautiful work ofart.

AtHabibi's we have attempted to create a world where a child is as free from theexternal pressures and expectations of our culture as possible. We realize thatoften we make assumptions about children entirely subconsciously - due only towhat we think we remember about how childhood should be and what a child shoulddo - and have therefore spent an enormous amount of time and energy delineatingand exposing our prejudices and preconceptions about childhood. Habibi's Hutchis a child's world. At the Hutch our children are immediately attended to andcan sit oftentimes one-on-one with a teacher for hours on end in an open-endedSocratic discourse on everything from bicycle riding, to literature, to physics,to death. This is a unique opportunity that is available at Habibi's. Even inour homes we are almost never able to put the rest of the universe on hold fornine hours and listen solely to our children's wants and needs (Nor should we- home is for Family not just Child). Likewise in our homes children can't jumpon the couch covered in paint with clay on their fingers, because it is not solelytheir house it is the family's house. The old house called Habibi's, however,is their house. We have attempted to create a place where they are jointly incharge of the activities, arrangement and use of this, their space - a placewhere they are not just biding their time until Mom or Dad gets off work, buta place uniquely their own, where they are in charge of their day.

We do not have rules at Habibi's save: "Don't hurt anyone including yourself".What we have instead are reasons. As stated, we have absolutely all day to talkto the kids. We never have to rush through something because it's time for languagearts or math. So we spend a titanic amount of time talking with the childrenabout why things aren't going exactly as they would have them at any given moment.We don't want children that are unthinkingly subordinate. We want children thatwill understand the rules that arise in other places in their lives and followthem because they make sense. At HH the child's desires and needs are paramount,but the teacher's role is not simply a supporting one. It is an active and guidingrole - like a master craftsman in an apprenticeship relationship. Our goal atHabibi's is to be scaffolding that guides and supports the work in progress thatis our children's cognitive development. We are mentors.

Our kids leave the Hutch with so much more than their ABCs and 123s. Theyall leave with a sense of themselves and a wonder and drive to know more aboutthemselves and their surroundings.

When learning is isolated, as it becomes in Kindergarten and is in most preschools,the child does not have a larger sense of "the way things are" either in math,science or language. What we provide for the child is a big picture about whatlearning entails in preparation for the picking apart of the written or readlanguage or the base-ten system (or whatever else) that follows.