School in an Orchard the Apple of Their Eyes

Once-in-a-lifetime experiences come around a little more often for Lillian B. Pierce.

At 21, she delivered the valedictory address at Princeton University flanked by baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr., renowned AIDS researcher Anthony S. Fauci and talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

Her summer job? Manipulating codes for the National Security Agency. She can’t say whether she’s making or breaking codes. It’s top secret.

Then Pierce, a Rhodes Scholar, heads to England’s Oxford University.

But when she reflects on her favorite experience, the one she would most like to relive, her mind drifts past these honors and famous names to the one-room schoolhouse her father built in their Southern California orchard.

The only teacher -- her mother -- started each school day singing, encouraged note-passing and never assigned homework or grades.

And Lillian “Lilly Bee” Pierce was hardly the exception from the Alice Adams White School. All seven students who studied amid the lush pomegranate, citrus and apricot trees went on to elite colleges, including three Ivy League universities and, now, Oxford.

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“Shoes are not worn in the classroom. It is pleasant to have slippers of some sort, but socks are perfectly comfortable.”

-- Alice Adams White School prospectus.

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A serpentine path winds through the Fallbrook, Calif., garden, leading to a shingled building with tall windows and vaulted ceilings. One wall is done in river rock; Japanese maples grow out front.

Oak desks and a rectangular seminar table furnish the single room. A Vermeer print hangs over a stone fireplace, and black-and-white tiles underfoot mimic the patterned floor in the painting.

“It’s an open, pleasant place for six people to be exposed to the best things I can think to offer them,” said Elizabeth “Libby” Pierce, a certified teacher who opened the school in 1989.

The Alice Adams White School -- or AAWS, pronounced “Oz” -- enrolled 10 students before it closed in 1994, a few only briefly; it’s reopening this fall.

Named for her husband’s teacher-grandmother, the school began as Libby Pierce’s answer for her two youngest children.

Lilly Bee knew long division by age 4 and her younger brother, Marshall, pored over a science reference manual at age 3. When a kindergarten teacher asked him to draw a stick figure, he frowned over its missing esophagus and spleen.

“I just thought, ‘Oh, I’d better do something different,’ ” Libby recalls.

She and her husband, Michael, considered starting a larger school elsewhere, and even bought the land. But they realized that zoning requirements would be easier to meet with a smaller school in their yard.

On drafting paper, Libby sketched a schoolhouse with everything she wanted and Michael, a builder, made it happen. AAWS opened when Lilly Bee was 9 and Marshall 6.

School days were rigorous but idyllic. Traditional subjects such as math and composition joined watercolors and five foreign languages: Japanese, German, Spanish, French and Latin.

On hot days, students sprawled on the floor as Libby read aloud.

They published a weekly newspaper, “Wizard’s Weekly Words.” Every sixth week, they staged a play--Shakespeare, Shaw or similar fare.

“It doesn’t seem possible now, all the things we fit into a day or a week,” said Alexandra Lyon, 20, who will be a junior at Smith College.

The absence of tests, homework and grades should not be mistaken for a lack of structure, she said.

“We didn’t exactly have homework, except that our entire lives were part of the school,” she said. “Which isn’t to say that we didn’t have free time. It’s just that we liked being there so much that everything we did had some connection to AAWS.”

The school operated until Lilly Bee reached high school age and Libby feared that she had reached her limit as a math and science teacher.

The Pierce children eventually landed at a community college. Their classmates went to public schools.

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“It is a school which reflects my views, aspirations and hopes combined with concessions to the possible; its strengths and limitations reflect only my own.”

-- Libby Pierce in the AAWS prospectus.

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Libby learned educational theory while attending graduate school at UCLA, where she also earned a bachelor’s in English and her teacher certification. Her research continued after her children were born.

The structure and curriculum of the school in her orchard do not fit any category she studied but rather represent “my own best guess as to what I ought to be doing,” she said.

She apparently guessed well. Several AAWS alumni consider the school their most significant educational experience.

Kent Cazimir Liske, 20, who will be a junior at Dartmouth, said the number and breadth of topics undertaken showed him how big the world was.

He learned at his own pace, was able to ask questions without fear, and stopped seeing grades or test scores as the ultimate reward.

“For someone else to evaluate your work, it can often give you false impressions of your progress and the value of your work,” he said. “If you can’t find value in your work by yourself, then what is it worth at all?”

Laura Derrick, president of the National Home Education Network, said that is precisely the goal of home schools or very small schools. She was not specifically acquainted with AAWS.

“If you can help them find that, then you are going to have someone who loves learning and goes for all the opportunities in front of them,” said Derrick, a mother of two home-schoolers in Austin, Texas. “That can change the course of a whole education.”

AAWS students suppose their own abilities and their families’ commitment to education played a large role in their academic success.

But in the end, they said, the school was Libby Pierce.

“It’s just absolutely interconnected,” said Nasreen Yazdani, 21, who graduated from Smith. “Libby really revolutionized my idea of what a teacher was.”

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“AAWS is reopening in the fall of 2002 after an eight-year hiatus. The goal of providing an atypical education for six children from unusual families remains intact.”

-- AAWS prospectus.

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Maybe her cartwheels aren’t as crisp as they once were, but Libby Pierce still turns them at 56.

And with her youngest leaving for college, she has decided to channel her energy into a new class of the orchard school.

She was partly motivated by a desire to help finance Marshall’s years at Harvey Mudd College. AAWS tuition is $7,000 a year, although Libby said the Pierces are years from recouping the money invested in the school.

The more Libby thought about reopening AAWS, the more the idea intrigued her. Could she rely on original sources more than textbooks? What would it be like to finally teach only other people’s children?

The new students are already getting to know their teacher. In June, Libby held a workshop on folk-inspired and percussion instruments.

“The new set of AAWSians, they don’t think they want to do theater,” Libby said. “But they will. I’m going to make sure they do.”

This fall, children will again take their places in the custom-made desks.

Libby plans to affix a small brass plate to each desk inscribed with the names of each student who ever sat there.

For the new students, AAWS is just beginning.

For their predecessors, it never really ended.