What Can We Learn From Dyke Brown?

“It is not enough to be concerned with the scholarly excellence of our students alone. The values and purposes with which well-trained minds will be committed are of equal importance.” -Dyke Brown, the founder of Athenian.

Current students may only have a vague idea of what Athenian stands for. The school emphasizes ideals of experiential learning and the six Round Square Pillars. While all of these are valuable, none of them really continue the legacy of Dyke Brown. The Pillars represent six categories that the school believes are a good way to achieve its goal of “developing the full person”, but they are almost completely unrelated to the Mandala, Dyke Brown’s initial sketch for how the school should function. The details of Athenian’s original plans and are barely remembered today.

Dyke Brown

Dyke Brown sketched his initial ideas for the school in a model he called the Mandala. It was the founding document of the school, and while many people recognize its ideas as common sense now, it was seen as progressive at the time. It ingrained the ideas of experiential learning and developing the full person into the school’s psyche, but the document itself is barely discussed today. There is so much to Dyke Brown’s vision that much of Athenian has forgotten about.

The Mandala emphasized a multitude of areas that the school should focus on for its students. These goals were: bodily capability, rational capability, spiritual capability, understanding of nature, understanding of humanity, understanding of self and others, under-standing of society. Dyke

Brown defined “under-standing of society” as the study of power structures and freedom/authority, while “understanding of man” was seen as the knowledge of various cultures and traditions. 

The goals are grouped by capability and understanding. Capability is the ability to do something, and understanding is the development of our knowledge, which is tied to our being. Capability and understanding are related, and both help develop all aspects of a person. Dyke Brown had a revolutionary vision that is rarely emphasized today—to develop every single aspect of a student’s life. Rather than just teach students the academics and leave them to develop on their own everywhere else, Brown wanted to work on everything—which was eventually sterilized into modern Athenian’s goal of “developing the whole person”.

“The whole of what you do, 24 hours a day, is your curriculum,” Dyke Brown said at his 90th birthday party. To realize his idea of developing all aspects of life, Dyke Brown understood that the school would need to take up the student’s whole existence. Thus, Athenian was developed as a boarding school. However, being a boarding student today is probably different from what Dyke Brown imagined. Although it is freeing to not have a constant “curriculum” every second of the day, being a modern boarding student is more about the community and commute rather than being a way for the school to help the student learn in all aspects of life. 

Experiential learning was at the core of the founding ideas of the school. Even before official studies had been conducted on experiential learning, Dyke Brown knew that students would learn best if they were allowed to experience their curriculum rather than just being told about it. 

One thing that has been long forgotten is the emphasis Dyke Brown placed on the experiential learning benefits of field trips. In 1974, Dyke Brown wrote this list of the planned trips Athenian students would embark on in the next year: an excavation at Point Reyes searching for artifacts from the Sir Frances Drake expedition, a professional dig in Mexico studying pre-conquest Native American groups, a month living with Inuit people to experience a non-Western culture and study their environmental balance, a program in Washington where students interned in government offices, and a month where students lived at a Mexican clinic and helped the families there.

Although it’s probably unrealistic for the school to attempt to financially support that many trips ever again, it shows what Dyke Brown’s devotion to “experiential education” meant. He also had several ideas for classes that could even be applied to modern Athenian. Of course, it’s important to understand that these classes could have evolved past what he envisioned for them due to a variety of circumstances. But if it is now possible to hold these classes again, it could be an option worth considering.

In the 1970s, an “Urban Center” concept was introduced , wherein seniors could choose to live in a house in the middle of a city for part of the year. They spent their time doing unpaid internships in government agencies, organizations, political campaigns, and media companies. The students would read a variety of political science books about urban society in their free time. 

As Dyke Brown explained it: “The main goal was to provide a more realistic way of learning about the processes, problems and institutions of modern urban America. At the same time, the students were jointly responsible for food preparation and procurement, and the running of the house.” Though this idea may seem extremely ambitious, it seems like a relevant experience given a world in which cities and urban problems are growing in importance. 

Dyke Brown suggested two more good ideas: that the best way to have students learn foreign languages was to send them to households where only that language was spoken. Language immersion is now commonplace but was not at the time. He also wanted to show students in-person demonstrations of surgeries for medical biology. He also had many ideas about how building character could be done through manual labor, and thought that having students contribute to the maintenance of the school was a good way to incorporate this. Athenian students from earlier decades had a lot more on-campus duties, including dishwashing and gardening.

Dyke Brown was likely not correct about everything, and all founding ideas ultimately have to adapt to the times. Additionally, outside factors thwarted certain ideas and plans. For example, the school developed day student programs and expanded to include a middle school, which created curriculum and culture needs that Dyke Brown hadn’t outlined. Still, many of his unimplemented ideas could still be as relevant and important now as they were back when Athenian was founded. There are many things to be learned about modern day Athenian by looking into the past at Dyke Brown’s founding ideas and methods.