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Teachers...Our Treasured Assets

Vicki Johnston
Director: Robert Muller School/Center for Living Ethics

"A teacher was condescendingly shaking her finger at a boy in my fourth-grade class. That was the day the firm intent to become a teacher was born in me. Years later in the halls of El Paso High School, the embryonic desire to serve mankind began to grow.

I received my Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Texas Western University in 1975. I had great fortune to be under the tutelage of one extraordinarily humane and open-minded professor, Dan Kies, who gave me excellent guidance and considerable freedom in the lab kindergarten at the university. During that period (the Vietnam War era), the connection between the way adults treat children on a daily basis, and the probability of world peace or war began impressing itself on my consciousness.

Then, just before graduation, I began to study Montessori with great joy. I fell in love with the reverence for the child's developmental processes and the beautiful materials offered in an environment of freedom and respect.

Right after graduation, I moved to Dallas with my husband, Luis, and two small children, Marissa, and Louie. Immediately, I enrolled in a Montessori training program and soon enrolled my children in Montessori Academy, where I worked as the music teacher and classroom assistant. Two years later, in 1977, I received a diploma from the American Montessori Teacher Training for the education of children from 3-6 years of age.

A Montessori Magnet school opened up in the projects in West Dallas. For six years, I taught fourth, fifth, and sixth graders at that school, which brought children of different races, ethnic groups, and socio-economic levels together. It was a challenging assignment for a greenhorn teacher. The greatest lesson of that period was that idealism was insufficient for helping children in whose lives violence, rape, and drugs were a common occurrence. However, the measures needed were not toughness, but LOVE that was intelligent and unconditional. The great child psychologists Thomas Gordon, and Haim Ginott, were pivotal teachers and through their writings, led me to powerful, yet humane guidance techniques.

From 1979 through 1981, I attended Texas Wesleyan College working towards a Masters of Education degree with a focus on Montessori Elementary Education. I received my Masters degree in 1981.

Feeling the need to press on, make my own mistakes, and broaden my horizons beyond Montessori, I opened a school in 1986. Subsequently, we embraced the World Core Curriculum and became a Robert Muller School. I continue to explore innovative approaches to learning and the school in incorporating ideas from Waldorf schools, Whole Language, and others. I believe the World Core Curriculum can build on the shoulders of previous educational giants, and is the optimal vehicle for the most enlightened education of the coming era. I am deeply grateful to Robert Muller, Gloria Crook, and the staff of the original Robert Muller School for initiating this great gift to humanity.

I am privileged to work with a staff that shares the vision of a world in which education is joyous, responsive to the child's nature, inspired and inspirational, and that opens hearts as it broadens minds. In our daily work, we are conscious that we are guiding and learning from tomorrow's leaders. It is our hope that the graduates of our school will embrace the planet with wisdom, heartfelt responsiveness, and brotherhood.

It is also with great joy that I observe my granddaughter, Alyssa, working and playing at the Robert Muller School in Fairview.