Isabel's Ideal
Strong ideas about Isabel’s thinking on education can be found in her diaries. Farming provided a pivotal activity as the basis for learning in many educational subjects. She considered it as having rich potential for developing an understanding of business, food production, health and much more.
Crucially, the farm context provided genuine, and not artifical, tasks which encouraged responsibility in a real situation. The implications of not taking farm duties seriously were felt by all and clearly observable, for example in the health of the animals. Isabel saw that nature and animals captivated children; her integration of these interests into her vision allowed intrinsic motivations to mingle with the daily work of caring for animals.
Abbreviations are scattered throughout her diaries – a common example occurs here with the symbol @ in place of 'at'.
My dream is a school surrounded by a community of picked people – these people themselves partly at any rate teachers but each pursuing their own avocations, who should be more or less freely open to the children. Thus there would be a farm with a skilled and if possible experimental farmer at the head, a physical and chemical laboratory doing its own progressive work and teaching the children something too, engineering shops, perhaps a factory or so, gravel-pits, brickfields, carpenters and furniture-making studios and very likely a theatre too.