Last Saturday, Signos secondary and high school held its fourth annual Primavera Forest Festival, an event which filled the school grounds with visitors throughout the day and evening.
For 25 years Signos College has offered a refreshing alternative to the traditional schools which pack kids into classrooms like sardines, forcing them to memorize facts they care nothing about and to regurgitate them at exam time.
For Signos, knowing and protecting the environment are so important that the school itself literally got up and moved out of the big city and plopped itself down in a remote spot right at the edge of the Primavera Forest, just beyond the west end of town. Here, in partnership with the Center for Environmental Culture and Educational Research (CCAIE), they took the forest itself right into their educational model, involving their students in all kinds of nature-related projects, many of which they share with the general public during their annual Primavera Festival.
For example, last Saturday they had a kind of interactive workshop which was repeated several times during the day. It was called “The University of a Tree,” promising that participants “just might come to the conclusion, in a very concrete way, that the thorough study of a single oak tree is truly equivalent to an entire university career,” and that you would surely walk out of the room convinced that “a tree is much more than a tree.”
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