Reprinted with permission from the Laconia Citizen

By BEA LEWIS
Saturday, June 12, 2010

The eleven members of the class of 2010 at Sant Bani School in Sanbornton along with Head of School Kent Bicknell, center, released white homing pigeons to kickoff their graduation ceremonies held Friday. Bea Lewis/Citizen Photo
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As family and friends applauded, the 11 members of the class of 2010 at Sant Bani School in Sanbornton kicked off their graduation ceremonies by releasing white homing pigeons.

Classmate Jacqueline Bartz, an ardent animal lover, owns the birds, which she regularly rents out at weddings. Friends said the birds are trained to fly home to Franklin.

Head of School Kent Bicknell told the several hundred people that gathered beneath a huge tent pitched on Allen Field to watch the ceremonies that Friday’s graduation marks the school reaching a milestone of 319 alumni.

“This afternoon we celebrate the life-journeys of these 11 wondrous souls behind me. They have accomplished much already, and they are just getting started. I have had the pleasure, honor, joy — you name it — to sit in English class with them for the last few months. We talked, thought and laughed…a lot. We were all students…all teachers,” he said.

During 12th grade English, Bicknell said early on his students read Plato’s Allegory of the Den or Cave and finished with Jack Kerouac’s Alone on a Mountaintop, — Kerouac’s account of the 63 days he spent alone in a fire tower on Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains of the great Northwest in the summer of 1956.

“Many of us are familiar with the idea captured in Plato’s story of the cave. We may recall that the dwellers in the cave were trapped in such a way that they took the shadows on the wall as reality rather than image — as substance rather than reflection.”

Bicknell said there is much more to Plato’s allegory.

“When we step out of the cave and see the light, it hurts our eyes, as it can be painful to gaze on the truth, to be confronted with a legitimate perspective vastly different from our own beliefs, which we had held so dear. Seeing what is truly real created a desire to go back and share this with friends still trapped in the illusion of the cave’s shadows. But, Plato warns us, the bearer of truth is as likely to be attacked as welcomed,” Bicknell said.

“This class, the Class of 2010, would embrace any truth-seeker…any truth-teller…with open eyes and open arms. They have feeling minds and thinking hearts,” he continued.

Bicknell also cited the words of Sant Bani founder, the Spiritual Teacher Kirpal Singh who wrote in the school’s guiding documents, “The chief malady of current education is that it results in the disassociation of heart and head. It lays emphasis on the development of head and does sharpen the intellect to some extent. But more essential is the liberation of the heart. That will be done when the reason is awakened in sympathy for the poor, the weak and the needy. Sacrifice grows out of the heart, so that the heart is required to be unfolded.”

“The Class of 2010 has the sharpened intellect piece well in hand; and their hearts are wide-awake,” Bicknell concluded.

Sant Bani Class of 2010

Jacqueline Bartz, Justine Borceux, Emily Braconier, Mira Carey-Hatch, Tajian de Mello-Folsom, Chapin Evans, Liana Hanrahan, Liana Hardcastle, Enelys Kalmus, Nicholas Lockwood and Quan Tran.