...So Did Ya' Get The Memo?

So the Blue Man Group – funny blue guys with no ears and homemade instruments – has opened up a school, according to an article I read in Time Magazine. After having established their reputation in Vegas, Tokyo and Chicago, they have now taken on another crowd – kindergarten.
Situated on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, The Blue School opened its doors in September to 61 NYC kids kindergarten age or younger, and plans to offer first grade in the coming year in hopes of extending all the way to fifth grade.
Jesse Newman for TIME

The question is what are the kids learning? The original Blue Men – Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink – collaborated on the project as a “sort of support group for people whose creativity has been all but squeezed out of them by education.”
They decided to find out whether or not there could be a school “you didn’t have to recover from” by joining forces with their wives as founding members of the school’s board.
The architecture, much like the funky allure of their shows, includes long tubes that swirl around corridors for kids to talk to one another (like the old can-and-string phones) and a Wonder Room with disco lights.
A school where you can express yourself with shaving cream and water hoses, have a half an hour of “glow time” (black lights where paintings and sculptures come to life), climb walls, and get weekly visits from yoga specialists is sure as hell somewhere I’d like to be. But one wonders how the group even came up with this curriculum and called it a school? Apparently, the founders worked with education experts, including British “creativity guru” Sir Ken Robinson and UCLA’s Daniel Siegel, to create the curriculum – and I’m assuming to shut fundamentalist educators up about a non-sense learning environment.
Classrooms have questions like “How do four-year-olds understand the color red?” written on the walls. Each section has been modeled according to their motto that learning is to be provoked, not imposed.
Although the school doesn’t suit everybody, the project seems interesting enough to include a few of its elements in other schools.
Here’s the catch, tuition for kindergarten is $27,300. The worst part is it’s not even the costliest of Manhattan’s overpriced private elementary schools, but it’s up there and applications have been pouring in. Why not? if parents can afford to send their kids to a school that they’ll be thanked for years to come, is a good enough investment for some, kindergarten or no kindergarten. I do have to agree with the fact that so many kids today are held back from personal expression and are coerced into their curriculum instead of lured into it with interesting activities that manage to help them learn at the same time. How is this really any different from making your kid listen to classical music as a fetus or forcing him/her into SAT classes at the age of five? Oh yeah, they have FUN and actually want to go to school to learn – a good association to create at an early age. Again, it’s not for everyone, but at least it could serve as a great experience for those who do attend The Blue School.
I must say my favorite part of the story was when a young boy was asked what his “provocation” is and he said it’s to ask what kind of fart everyone is. Now, if that isn’t self-expression, I don’t know what is.