Greg Farrell
’57 helps schools reinvent their curricula and cultures.
A
new educational model
Greg Farrell ’57 structures schools around learning expeditions
To get a sense of what Greg Farrell ’57 has been doing for
the past five decades, you have to go back to school: to Grass Valley
Charter School in Grass Valley, Calif., or to King Middle School
in Portland, Maine, or to Genesee Community Charter School in Rochester,
N.Y., where Claire, a fourth-grader leading a tour of the building,
describes how students are expected “to cooperate, to respect
each other, to solve problems together, and to get the work done
and not goof off.” She pauses like a seasoned orator. “We
are crew, not passengers,” she says.
That phrase is a mantra of Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound
(ELOB), whose approach to teaching was adopted by Claire’s
elementary school when it opened four years ago. Started in 1992
under Farrell’s direction, ELOB contracts with 137 public,
private, and charter schools nationwide, helping them reinvent their
curricula and culture according to 10 design principles. The principles,
which fall under headings like “the primacy of self-discovery,”
“success and failure,” and “service and compassion,”
are adapted from tenets that guide ELOB’s parent organization,
Outward Bound USA, the nonprofit known for the wilderness adventures
it has led for the past 40 years.
A cornerstone of an ELOB school is the idea of learning expeditions
— opportunities to “learn by doing,” says Farrell.
Each expedition centers around a discrete topic, lasts from eight
to 10 weeks, and incorporates field study, relevant literature,
community service, and a performance or presentation component “so
that you’re not just doing it for Mrs. Higgins,” quips
Farrell, who majored in English at Princeton.
Although Farrell’s first job after college was teaching
high school in Hawaii for two years, it wasn’t until the mid-1960s,
after he had served in the Army and worked at Princeton in the admission
office, that he formulated his own vision of what education should
look like. In 1964 he was working as an education reporter for the
Times of Trenton when he took a month off to complete an
Outward Bound instructor’s course in Colorado. “I came
down off the mountain and was very deep into the core of the elements,”
says Farrell, “and I thought, ‘This is the way school
ought to be.’”
He returned to Trenton and started a school-within-a-school called
Action Bound. The program closed after five years, but it provided
Farrell with what he deemed a valuable opportunity to fail and,
later, after 20 years as executive director of the Fund for the
City of New York, he applied the wisdom gained to what would become
ELOB’s success.
That success has led to a recent grant from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation that will fund 20 new small high schools to be
run by ELOB, which will find the buildings, hire the teachers, recruit
the students, and develop the curriculum. The ability to create
something from scratch excites Farrell, who ultimately hopes that
ELOB’s way of teaching and learning is adopted so universally
that it just “becomes school.”
By Jessica Dheere ’93
Jessica Dheere ’93 is a freelance writer in New York
City.
