“If the limits of language are the limits of our world, well then, language itself takes on a creative role in the formation of reality. That suggests that different linguistic systems could not only describe the world differently, but effectively create different ‘realities’ for their speakers.
Imagine what could happen if a child grows up exploring not one but two cultural ‘realities’, experiencing Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and Italian philosophical creativity every day.
This is no abstract idea; it’s what happens every day at Rootes School.
During a lesson in the primary school, a child raises their hand and, while looking closely at a digital page, asks, with amazement:
“Teacher, why does history change if it’s seen from a different viewpoint?”
That is a simple question, but it contains the power of a method which shows kids how to navigate between cultures and different perspectives so they can think freely, reason critically and discover new routes in their daily educational journey every day.
This is the essence of Rootes School: educating fully-aware explorers, individuals free to create new realities and ready to navigate successfully in a world undergoing continuous evolution.
Our method doesn’t limit itself to ‘adding up’ two school syllabuses: it binds them together. We call this approach Blended Learning: the art of fusing two educational cultures in a single journey which exploits the compatibility of their strong points.
So, for example:
Our classes are dynamic: learning arises from direct experience and research, not only from a front-on lesson. Inquiry-Based Learning leads children to ask themselves questions, explore and link up diverse knowledge.
A fundamental element of this process is the handling of mistakes: these are not seen as a failure, but as an opportunity for research. Making a mistake becomes the first step towards understanding better, creating new hypotheses and developing cognitive resilience.
One mainstay of the Rootes method is critical thought: being able to look at reality from different points of view, assess sources, and argue in favour or against. This approach is applied in both Italian and English and prepares students to act in complex, multicultural contexts
The journey is organised to accompany students from their first years of life through to pre-adolescence, respecting times of development along the way. Some hard skills, such as reading and writing, may surface more slowly than they do in a traditional school, but once they do, they lend themselves to greater depth and autonomy. From the fourth grade onwards, this apparent delay turns into a tangible advantage, namely the ability to learn autonomously, confidence when tackling complex tasks, and a talent for discovery.
The Rootes School method is: