I willingly spent six weeks of the summer before my senior year of high school living in a dormitory and taking classes. I was studying English at Salem College at the Governor’s School of North Carolina, a residential program for academically and intellectually gifted students.

Earlier this summer, I began hearing from friends across the state, one on her way to Dartmouth, another who I have corresponded with for years about Sylvia Plath and our own poetry, one at an art school in Soho and another art student who I remember as much for his display of diagrams of hearts painted on glass as for his role in an outdoor dance at dawn. We were all excited about going to the Governor’s School reunion symposium, back to the campus where we had spent a summer.

The current focus in education often seems to be on standardizing schools results and helping the disadvantaged, but students who are enthusiastic about academics, like those who continue to attend Governor’s School, serve as a reminder that education is not only about equalizing and coaxing poorer students to perform. It’s also about encouraging all students to learn at their highest level.

The experience of Governor’s School is for many participants the first time schooling is thought-provoking. The instruction at Governor’s School was so well done that Jacob Cecil, an art student, has decided to teach art. A drama student, Shea Walker, told me, “I learned more in those six weeks than I did in all of high school. High schools don’t cater to advanced artists and students. The grueling six week program, two major shows, two minor, and staged readings done in six weeks, compared to one major show over six weeks, challenged the gifted person more than a public school would offer them.” Governor’s School is also often the first time many find groups of people that shared their interests. The drama student later became my college roommate.

Every year the program, funded by the General Assembly of North Carolina, allows 800 students to be selected to study the subject area in which they are talented - English, Spanish, French, mathematics, natural and social sciences, art, choral and instrumental music, dance or drama - free of charge. No grades or tests are given and courses emphasize contemporary ideas and the teaching of theory over fact through activities and three daily classes. “In public schools, students learn what to know. In Area I courses at Governor’s School, they learn what to think about. In Area II they learn how to think,” Governor’s School publications say.

The day I arrived, the program started with a presentation during which groups of students took apart the speaker’s podium. The following days of that summer continued to dismantle concepts of what school was. It was here, as an English student, that I spent my evenings in the art studio sculpting with wire. My text was the New Yorker fiction issue, and the assignment I created for myself was to copy e. e. cummings’ poetry on cafeteria napkins for others to find. At my lunch table a friend preformed a conceptual art piece that involved observing people’s reactions as he stacked tiers of glasses filled with brightly colored drinks and arranged intricate patterns of food and silverware. Other conceptual artists insistently swept the road or ticketed tourists for imagined crimes. We were treated to ongoing film showings and discussion groups and stage seats at live performances of jazz and Phillip Glass compositions. I got my first exposure to John Cage’s work in an evening of music created with the opening and closing of umbrellas, radio static and the shuffling noises of the audience. Dance students crept over auditorium seats in waves during their show. Rainy days were spent with free range of the art galleries and listening rooms. On the last morning of Governor’s School, when students woke painfully early to walk through Old Salem to bakeries and cafes for final breakfasts together, it was a sad day of realization that we would probably never be able to indulge ourselves intellectually in this way again, never be surrounded by people doing the same again.

As a Franklin resident, Ian Holloway, a friend who had gone to Governor’s School several years before and convinced me to apply, described the experience, “It is one large bubble of stagnant time that doesn’t move so one ends up appreciating a specific moment of time for six weeks. It is a small heaven that is hard to see until one leaves, then one searches for that completion again until one discovers that Governor’s School is not an exterior place. It is something inside everyone, a wished for place of belonging and understanding. This particular place happens for the 800 brightest kids in N.C.”

The program has a long history of such success, even within my family. When she attended in 1965, my mother was introduced to multiple new ideas, Bob Dylan’s albums, her college roommate and her first husband. The Governor’s School of North Carolina opened only two years earlier, and was the first of its kind. Now 34 states have programs modeled on North Carolina’s. Governor’s School literature says that Governor Terry Sanford, who founded the program in 1963, “envisioned an educational opportunity for the best students to immerse themselves in modern concepts and cross-disciplinary thinking.” Accurately, it continues, “To Sanford and other educators, public schools served the needs of the masses, but did not promote the needs of gifted students.”

Governor’s School already relies on the support of alumni contributions, and with decreases in funding for education and state programs in general, I hope that North Carolina will continue to cultivate and give opportunities to its promising students, and that it will be remembered that education is more than a battle for a passing grade.

(Rose McLarney is a Warren Wilson College student from Franklin.)

 

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