Our Vision
Our focus is to nurture an innovative mind.
Creativity is now seen as a crucial element in education.
Innovation: Children are born with infinite possibilities and with a massive appetite to learn. The role of education is clearly, to help children understand the world around them and within them. So that they can become compassionate, fulfilled, and engaged individuals. The deficit in education is to engage the child’s inner world and recognize how much they could become and their possibilities are. To let them blossom to their fullest potential.
Our focus is on improving the effectiveness of early education and children’s well-being. We offer a learning environment that is carefully planned for children’s active learning. Creative arts are important in children’s lives. Therefore, their promotion and fostering from early years and thought education. Our children’s imagination is infinite. We offer the children a varied break from everyday life, in which they can pursue their urge for expression. We also offer the children a safe space to exchange ideas with their peers, develop creatively together, and benefit from each other.
There are numerous publications about childcare, creativity, and children’s general well-being out there. Among others from A. Stern, R. Seitz, R. H. Largo, or M. Montessori, but it is our true interest in them, that makes the difference as children can feel if we care, or not. Therefore, I allow myself to speak out of my inner beliefs. If you ask me, why do I choose ADA as my life journey? The answer would be: ‘I was once that child’. My aim will always be, to treat them with the view and respect I wished to have received at that age. To be able to give them the answers and the support they ask for, through my own experience, personality, my art, and learned skills. To offer them that, what I wanted to receive as a child with strong willpower and vision, as to find out, who am I and what is it, that I supposed to do. Children live in their perfection…never minor and always with an important voice.
We emphasize the atmosphere of peace and harmony. Each participant is equal, each child and his needs are taken seriously. As mentioned by Arno Stern. Playing is the very thing that uses all abilities and develops all abilities. Through it, you look within yourself and do not need anything else. It is dancing, making music, and painting that should be every child’s life basis, everything else comes later by itself. A child can do what it wants, and it does not want to do anything other than what it can.
This sentence has proven itself by the words of one child in our class. “We love to paint, and we do that what we love.” (7y) If a child feels warm, welcomed, safe, and accepted as it is, then it will freely share his needs. In my experience, the young child will usually say what he wants when he feels secure and safe within the environment, by accepting and allowing this pure honesty we foster his well-being, intellect, and innovative mind. Younger children learn when they play. Once they are ready in their level of development, they become curious and seek new impulses. The child simply asks. How do I do this? That is when they want to learn, and that is when their learning is to progress healthily.
“I am here because I like being and feel good here. I can paint whatever I want to.” (6y)
“I draw and paint here that I can not do at home. Here I learn how to do it.” (10y)
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” (Steve Jobs)
Our key sentence is – everyone matters.
Respect together with a kind and positive attitude is the way forward. Along on the side with:
- Partnership with parents
- Each child is an individual
- To engage actively with what concerns the child the most
- A democratic perspective
- Equal opportunities to progress and develop
- An anti-discriminatory approach
- Fostering positive attitude in self and others, and counter negative messages children may have received.
Today’s difficulties in education
The major problem is a system of mass education. That has been invented, made up as a part of the industrial revolution. It was associated with moving from the countryside into the cities to provide a workforce for the industrial economy. There is the deeply mistaken assumption that intelligence is the same thing as academic ability. This system has created many problems. The conditions, which are industrial in character, create problems for kids, which they at some point begin to rail against. We are mistaking information for education. Deadening the brain with too much information leads to a loss of innovative intelligence. (As stated by Sir. Ken Robinson)
Bruner (1986) argues that we have placed great value on logical and systematic thought, and that intuitive thought has not received the attention it deserves. This has led to an overemphasis on the ability to retain and repeat facts, to be impartial, dispassionate, and detached. It can mean that learning is not gained through first-hand experiences but based on accepting the understandings of others with the result that our ability to see the world through our own eyes decreases.
When only the rational aspects of learning and development are stressed we deprive ourselves of the human ability to think. Science and technology require the ability to think creatively as much as any of the arts subjects traditionally associated with this aspect of learning.
There should be no conflict between the two modes of thinking, between the logical and the intuitive. It is not a case of either/or but of both. They offer complementary views and, when combined, advance our understanding of the world in which we live and our ability to respond creatively to the challenges it presents.
We need a school curriculum with the arts, humanities, sciences, technology, not in hierarchy, but equally and coequally important. That is where some kids will discover themselves most fully. What we need is innovative intelligence. So should every school.
If we create a holistic environment. An environment that is addressing your spiritual development, your physical development, which recognizes that human life is not linear, it’s organic and it will take many different courses, then you will have a completely different condition under which people will flourish. (Robinson, 2016, in interview “The ideal education“)
“The art class is one of my favourite places. And the reasons are really simple as a 5th grader I work six hours a day five days a week plus extra math and german lessons. But when I am at the art class I feel free and happy. I don’t have to be scared of which grade or which homework I will get. And those are my reasons.” (Ekin 11y)