High School

From the age of fourteen or fifteen to about seventeen, the first flowering and fruition of thought arise from the careful husbandry of the previous period. What was subconsciously grasped as pictorial understanding, through the faculty of respect, now miraculously metamorphoses, through sexual maturity and the birth of the individual spirit (which culminates around twenty one), into freedom of creative expression and self-motivated curiosity about the secrets of the world. The teacher has now more a specialist role, from subject to subject, to encourage and inspire this awakening. From this period onwards evolves the quest of universal wisdom – a quest that ends in death and immortality.

All subjects transmute during this period in an individual way, but the overriding theme is unaltered, with a singular difference: the pupils emerge increasingly as free-thinking individuals in relationship to the cosmos, of which the earth and its history is the focus; whereas previously, mediation of the teacher-authority was necessary. The link is direct now – full adulthood is the outcome: men and women, independent, respectful, creatively unique, compassionate citizens, at once individual, Australian and universal.