About Us
Overview
Alice Miller School opened in 2016. The school is now at full capacity with waiting lists for most year levels. It is a Year 7-12 sibling-school to Candlebark School near Romsey.
The first and most important rule at Alice Miller and Candlebark is “no excluding”, which underscores the importance the school attaches to generosity, tolerance and courtesy.
Alice Miller builds on Candlebark’s success by adopting the same approach to education, but also by dedicating itself passionately to the development of students’ artistic abilities. The school recognises the growing importance and legitimacy of the arts in our society, and is strongly aligned with the views of educators like Sir Ken Robinson on the value of creativity in individual lives. It acknowledges the capacity of artistic expression to contribute to a sense of wellness, fulfilment and joy – and to enhance career prospects in the 21st century.
Alice Miller is committed with equal strength to its academic program. High-powered, creative, dedicated teachers with a dynamic approach to the best interests of their students are fundamental to Alice Miller’s educational philosophy.
We perform extremely well academically, despite being small and non-selective (see Learning and Results). However, this is a natural result of the way we work with young people, rather than a primary goal or obsession.
What makes us different?
How does Alice Miller differ? In other words, what is its unique rationale?
Some of the differences are tangible. For example:
1. Alice Miller operates from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM, times designed to coincide more effectively with the sleep/work patterns of teenagers. However, the school and its facilities can be accessed by students from 9 AM each weekday. This enables many students to practise music, work on art pieces, do homework, play chess, continue with projects or assignments. The school runs buses to and from Macedon, Sunbury and Woodend Stations, to meet trains on the Melbourne-Bendigo line that service the 10:00-4:30 timetable.
2. Space is a great luxury. One of the greatest gifts we offer young people is space to run, to explore, to be. Alice Miller is located on an attractive 80 acre bush campus, with a five-hole golf course. The property is shared with kangaroos, koalas, echidnas, wombats and platypus. The school is well resourced, with 22 classrooms, dedicated science laboratories, a professional standard gymnasium, and tennis and basketball courts.
3. Students are encouraged to take VCE subjects early in their secondary school careers – from Year 9 where appropriate – to widen their knowledge, challenge them intellectually, help them acquire good study skills, and prepare them for Years 11, 12 and beyond.
4. Students clean the school at the end of each day. This is part of educating young people to accept responsibility for their own deeds (and misdeeds). The school does not believe that it is in the interests of students to pay adults to clean up messes they themselves have left behind.
5. Food is provided at school, at no additional cost to parents. This not only eliminates the chore of making packed lunches each morning, but also, and more importantly, aids in the growth of collegiality, as students and staff eat morning tea and lunch together. Students take turns in preparing and serving food, as well as clearing away afterwards, thereby learning valuable lessons that will stand them in good stead in their adult lives.
Further differences between Alice Miller and other schools are more abstract. For example:
1. As a small school, Alice Miller can offer a level of collegiality and pastoral care not easily available at larger schools.
2. As well as offering mainstream subjects, from Years 7 to 12, Alice Miller offers courses for young people wishing to specialise in Drama, Art, Music or Outdoor Education and Environmental Studies. Such specialisation is a rarity in Victoria.
3. Alice Miller has a number of features in common with Candlebark, such as:
(a) Staff selection: Teachers are appointed because they are pre-eminent in their fields, have a variety of life experiences, are intelligent, adventurous and creative, and are exceptional communicators in the classroom.
(b) An awareness of the difference between knowledge and wisdom and a commitment to helping young people advance in both. The Western model of education, rarely concerning itself with the acquisition of wisdom, often fails to recognise, explicitly or implicitly, the difference between wisdom and knowledge. An awareness of this distinction would show in, for example, the treatment of a literary text as an opportunity to engage with issues such as social division, justice, morality, alienation, `othering’ and discrimination, and the core question of what it means to be human, as well as the more familiar studies of plot, characterisation, style and literary devices.
(c) An emphasis on first-hand experiences. One of the main reasons for the establishment of Candlebark was the belief that young people no longer have the opportunity for first-hand experiences, but instead gain `experiences’ by watching television, playing computer games, and, in the immediate future, using virtual reality devices. At Alice Miller, as at Candlebark, students go on hikes, bike camps, canoe trips and snow camps, as well as trips to galleries, museums and festivals. Both schools aim to encourage the growth of confidence, independence, community and trust.
(d) Many schools pay lip-service to the notion that education should not end at the school gates. Alice Miller — and Candlebark – commit to that notion actively and explicitly. Not only do we facilitate students’ engagement with the world by frequent trips `off-campus’ but we bring the world to our students by inviting everyone from artists to shoemakers, footballers to backpackers, authors to architects, educators to jockeys. People from all walks of life and a variety of backgrounds come and take workshops, give presentations, chat, work collaboratively, or just hang out.
(e) Alice Miller has more of the flavour of a university than a typical Australian school. Guest tutors, lunchtime clubs and activities, coffee shop chats with staff and peers about matters philosophical, political and cultural – this is the style of the school.
Ethos of Alice Miller School
“…it’s important to seek out a school that has a head (in other words, a commitment to intellectual growth as well as academic success), a heart (a genuinely caring school with excellent relations between staff and students), a soul (a real vision of where the school wants to go and what it’s doing to get there) and legs (an active and proactive school that is energised and has a strong momentum and sense of purpose…
It is a commonplace to say that schools in the 21st century need to be flexible, versatile, and geared to the needs of young people in a rapidly changing world. However, the fact that these words and phrases are used with monotonous regularity does not detract from the truths that they express.
The structure of most Australian schools, fundamentally unchanged since the 19th century, is increasingly inappropriate. Today’s children and teenagers live in a world where, as American Duke University Professor Cathy Davidson writes in her book Now You See It (2011): “By one estimate, 65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.” In 2012 Forbes Magazine reported that “The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years… but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that. Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between 1977-1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years… That means they would have 15 – 20 jobs over the course of their working lives!”
Today’s children and teenagers are accustomed to highly varied and motivating leisure time activities, a high degree of autonomy, and many options being available to them. Even children from families which are considered low income by Australian standards are wealthy compared to previous generations, and compared to children in the majority of other countries. Travel is second nature to many members of this generation of young Australians: they see the world as a global village. Traditional non-school activities, including regular attendance at places of worship, membership of groups such as scouts, and participation in sporting clubs, are decreasing in popularity.
There are good and bad aspects to these changes in our society, but it is not helpful to students if schools ignore these profound and continuing developments.
The rigid authoritarian structure of schools, which extends, inter alia, to curriculum, timetables, behaviour management and subject choices, is at odds with the kind of world today’s young graduates will enter. The structure and practices of Alice Miller and Candlebark Schools are designed to match the world of the 21st century.
At the risk of using another cliché which has become almost meaningless in the 21st-century Western world, Candlebark is modelled upon the village – namely, the village that it takes to raise a child. Candlebark does not seek to replicate the family: rather, it is based upon the principle that a community of “elders”, who are knowledgeable, experienced, good-humoured and imaginative, contributes positively and profoundly to the healthy development of a child.
Alice Miller also has much of the village about it, but is intended to operate more like a university, with a flexible timetable, many choices available to students, an absence of authoritarianism and mindless rigidity, and hours better suited to adolescents’ body rhythms. This enables students to better pursue their interests, their passions, and realise their career goals and life ambitions. A student who is attracted to scientific subjects can select subjects which allow her to turn her attention increasingly to those areas and improve her skills in them. Unusually for Victorian schools, Alice Miller students are also encouraged to major in Art, Music and Drama, and the school’s structure is designed to allow these students to give serious time and attention to these areas. Alice Miller seeks to provide a mature, innovative, flexible and creative environment in which learning takes place in optimal conditions, and motivation comes from students’ ability to choose the paths best suited to them and their appreciation of the courtesy and respect with which they are treated.
Who Is Alice Miller?
ALICE MILLER (1923-2010)
Alice Miller School is named for the Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller, author of ”The Drama of Being a Child” and twelve other books about the treatment of children in Western society. A Holocaust survivor, Miller’s work was characterised by honesty, fearlessness, and an unflinching search for truth. She never backed away from confronting uncomfortable realities about child-raising. Her courage in doing so made it easier for others to follow in her footsteps.
Alice Miller:
“It is not a child’s task or duty to satisfy his parent’s needs.”
“If I allow myself to feel what pains or gladdens me, what annoys or enrages me, and why this is the case, if I know what I need and what I do not want at all costs, then I will know myself well enough to love my life and find it interesting, regardless of age or social status.”
“I understand a healthy self-feeling to mean the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are a part of one’s self. This certainty is not something one can gain upon reflection; it is there like one’s own pulse, which one does not notice as long as it functions normally.”
“One is free from depression only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.”
“Admiration is not the same thing as love. It is only a substitute gratification of the primary needs for respect, understanding, and being taken seriously.”
“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality – the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, despair, and grief.”
“There are other ways of exploiting the child apart from the sexual: through brainwashing, for instance, which underlies both the ”anti-authoritarian” and the ”strict” upbringing. Neither form of rearing takes the child‘s needs into account. “
“Unfortunately, children are too often wished for only as symbols to meet repressed needs.”