HADLEY – When they look back 50 years from now at photos of The Hartsbrook School’s 2016 high school graduation, will people remember where they were taken?
A wedding, maybe? Are those well-dressed young people on the stage – men in suits with grass-green ties and women in white – groomsmen and bridesmaids? Is it a family reunion, as everyone here does seem to know each other?
The hallmarks of a high school graduation are absent. The kids on stage do not wear gowns. The music is Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” and not “Pomp and Circumstance” or inspirational Top-40 hits. It happens under a big white tent in an open green field behind the school, not in a gymnasium, and small children play in the grass on the perimeter.
But a graduation it is, the commencement of 14 seniors from Hartsbrook on Saturday.
Hartsbrook does things differently from its public school counterparts in general. It is a Waldorf school, meaning it prizes creativity and experiential learning over textbooks and memorization.
On Saturday, speakers at the graduation emphasized themes like community, friendship and connection to nature.
Faculty Chair Virginia McWilliam gave the welcome address, and she commended the graduating students on their consistent virtuosity, something she noted when she first met them as eighth graders.
“I was very impressed that you were living by the principle that it was uncool to be unkind,” she said. “It was clear you were determined to leave this fine community even better than when you entered it, and you have.”
McWilliam finished speaking, and at once, all the Hartsbrook students left their seats. The seniors switched places with the underclassmen who had been in their own student section. Some of the younger students took up instruments: violins, a cello, a drum kit, electric guitars and a bass. Others prepared to sing.
“People get ready, there’s a train a comin’,” they harmonized. “You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board.”
The full band kicked in. A solid baseline backed the vocalists.
“People get ready for the train to Jordan,” they sang. “It’s picking up passengers from coast to coast.”
Seniors bobbed their heads. A young boy in the back of the tent grooved while cradling an even younger relative. A rhythmic clap spread from near the stage through the whole tent, and people swayed, as in a church.
“There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own,” the song continued.
The musicians finished, and the seniors retook the stage. Instead of one student giving an address, a dozen of them lined up for short remarks to form one speech. They read poetry, essays, excerpts from books.
“I learned the wood’s strengths and weaknesses and how to adapt to them,” Gaelen Hall said of a senior project in which he built a boat. “The mark of a great boat builder and of a great teacher is someone who can take those qualities and make them into a vessel.”
“I want to take a walk in your shoes,” Connor Ritchie-Dunham read. “Around your neighborhood. You can come, too.”
“Thirteen strong pairs of hands will catch me, and with a sigh of gentle music, I will be safe,” Isabella Lederman finished a poem.
After another musical performance – this one by the class of 2016 – Cherrie Latuner, who teaches literature and French at Hartsbrook, took the podium.
She spoke of her own journey to Hartsbrook and of the necessity of environmental consciousness.
She referenced Pulitzer Prize-winning author E.O. Wilson, who has called for half the planet to be designated as a nature preserve, and the Transcendentalists, whose work she teaches.
“I am part and parcel of god,” she said, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Children, tired of sitting still, ran through the field beside the tent as she talked about the trials that make nature stronger, of floods and fires and regrowth.
“Everywhere in nature, there is sacrifice and ascendancy through forms to richness,” she said as rain thrummed on the top of the tent.
And Emerson, again: “‘Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?’”
There’s a train a comin’.
Jack Evans can be reached at jackevan@indiana.edu.