Invictus: “I Am Not A Victim”

“Vertex Partnership Academies is organized around the four cardinal virtues of Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom, both as an expectation for each student and faculty member in our community to personally adopt, and as a conceptual framework that shapes every aspect of school culture, policies, canon and curriculum.”

Vertex Partnership Academies in the Bronx is an extraordinary school. Composed of almost exclusively minority youth, there’s no victimhood here. Students take responsibility for their learning, are held accountable for their successes and failures, read the US Constitution daily, and dive head-on into educational foundations.

In early April, my team and I went to Vertex. Our week began by teaching Spectrum Street Epistemology (SSE) to educators and leading SSE sessions with students. The goal was to help foster critical thinking, open dialogue, free inquiry, civil discourse, and to help students develop healthy habits of thought (disconfirmation, justification, trustfulness of reason, belief revision, etc.).

In the evening, Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex, Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of Michaela Community School in England, and I had a fireside chat. These videos should be released next month. I highly recommend our forthright and even blunt conversation about education, minorities and society, and the current state of K-12 education.