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The Student Newspaper of Hopkins School

Learning Outside the Box

It’s two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, I’m stuck in my room, again. I look up from work and glance at the picture of a forest on my calendar. I long to be outside. 
Spending my summers in the woods, I have learned important life skills about living and working as a community that I never could have learned in an academic setting. This has showed me that even though we learn so much throughout the school year, a crucial part of our education should be fulfilled in a non-classroom setting, be it in nature’s classroom or simply out of the Hopkins bubble.

During the school day, we spend the majority of our time cooped up in a classroom. At night we go home and spend more time sitting at a desk doing homework. On weekends, we try to get out of the house and do some- thing fun, but often we wind up back at our desks doing work. While this type of learning prepares us academically for the “real” world, it does not prepare us for many of the challenges we will face at college and in the professional world. As Mark Twain once said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

In the classroom we discuss all of these issues: political, environmental, etc. But we never leave the classroom to experience them first hand. We have someone telling us about them, but as students we have the obligation to go out into the world and have meaningful experiences for ourselves. So many of our experiences these days are manufactured for us, but as we gradually grow into adulthood and leave the sheltered bubble of our homes and Hopkins we will find that the real world is not a place of experiences that can simply be bought and sold.

We rarely venture out of the classroom. While many valuable lessons can be learned in the classroom there are others that simply cannot. The classroom is meant to foster learning and academic growth, but it is not the real world, but rather a sheltered bubble in which we spend the majority of our time. If we fail to venture outside of the classroom we risk being extremely disconnected with the world outside of the classroom as well as with the natural world. 
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Editor in Chief 
Asher Joseph

Managing Editor 
Margaret Russell

News
Claire Billings
Jo Reymond
Rose Porosoff
Features
Eric Roberts
Abby Rakotomavo
Elona Spiewak
Veena Scholand
 
Arts
Miriam Levin
Liliana Dumas
Saisha Ghai
Olivia Yu
Op/Ed
Anya Mahajan
Rain Zeng
Winter Szarabajka
Aerin O'Brien

Sports
Karun Srihari
Samantha Bernstein
Hana Beauregard
Micah Betts
Elaina Paktuka
Editors-at-Large
Edel Lee
Anjali van Bladel
Nate Gerber
Rebecca Li

Cartoonists
Hailey Willey
Web Editors
Amelia Hudonogov-Foster
Anvi Pathak
Chloe Wang

Faculty Advisers
Stephen May
Elizabeth Gleason
Shanti Madison
The Razor's Edge reflects the opinion of 4/5 of the editorial board and will not be signed. The Razor welcomes letters to the editor but reserves the right to decide which letters to publish, and to edit letters for space reasons. Unsigned letters will not be published, but names may be withheld on request. Letters are subject to the same libel laws as articles. The views expressed in letters are not necessarily those of the editorial board.
     
The Razor, an open forum publication, is published monthly during the school year by students of: 
Hopkins School
986 Forest Road
New Haven, CT 06515

Phone: 203.397.1001 x628
Email: smay@hopkins.edu
986 Forest Road
New Haven, Connecticut 06515
(203) 397-1001