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Currently, we have completed the most general part. 'Our goal is to raise our children to be happy, healthy adults who contribute to the well-being of their environment.' But what does the school do, and what kind of children do we want to nurture? We are rephrasing BPS's principles to provide gentle yet firm guidance in everyday life.
Let's rephrase the principles of BPS to provide gentle yet firm guidance in everyday life.
In essence, every year we ask ourselves why BPS exists, what we aim to achieve. Do we have any more specific guiding principles beyond wanting to nurture happy, healthy individuals who contribute to society from our children? But this year, we felt the need to thoroughly reconsider our goal with the school. We slightly modified our main statement:
Our goal is for our children to become happy, healthy adults who contribute to the well-being of their environment.
So far, we concluded the sentence by saying that BPS children are useful to society. However, we didn't really like this. The current ending, "contribute to the well-being of their environment," describes much better where we stand now. Our environment is important, whether it's friends, family, our street, our village, our city, our country, or the entire Earth, humanity. And well-being is important, both ours and others'.
After many hours of work, reflection and discussion, the whole BPS community was able to formulate which of our values we consider very important. The challenge was quite difficult: let's summarise ourselves in a paragraph.
In BPS, children discover and develop their self-confidence and abilities in a safe and supportive environment. They become aware of how to align their desires and intentions with their opportunities. They learn to leverage their strengths and find enjoyment in overcoming challenges they set for themselves. Continuously progressing towards their goals, they also prioritize their health and happiness.
And what do we think about the BPS children? What are they like today, and what kind of adults will they become? Which abilities and qualities do we most want to develop in them? We started with the idea that we want conscious, proactive, and kind children. This is how we formulated our guidelines:
Children with BPS open up to the world with an intrinsic interest and empathy, and constructively shape their own lives and the processes around them. In addition to their goodwill, they also take conscious action to create positive change in their environment.
We find these statements both powerful and 'very BPS-like.'
If we manage to firmly establish these few sentences, then we will define the focus areas of our main developmental goals:
In line with this, our next focus area truly begins: the development of the curriculum.