ABSTRACT
Schools tailored to the needs of eleven to fourteen year olds are filled with personal experiences that are often exploratory in nature. A hoped for outcome for middle level education is for these personal experiences to be positive and growth producing. However, some school experiences, because of varying circumstances, cause our students to feel quiet and meaningless, as if they had, as Eliot notes in the quote above, a headpiece filled with straw. What could be more tragic, in my judgment, than causing any student to feel this way: This is particularly true when students in early adolescence are, at the same time, filled utterly with a desire to be needed and filled utterly with the fire and passions of life.
