I am always humbled to know that I have had a philosophical career that could only have been born in an atmosphere like the one at Waxahachie High School.

While I was never one of the computer science and research kids, Doc Hastings was really great at including folks like me in the mix so that we benefitted from the environment that he and his colleagues were creating with these young researchers. Despite not being oriented on the sciences, he and fellow students like Steve Weldon and Jim McDonald brought me into a place where speaking our minds with care and a sense of humor was the norm. Doc is so right that my old alma mater should be super proud of this, and it is strange that it is not spoken of very much if at all.

Roughly from the late 1970′s to the mid 1980′s Waxahachie High School and the Waxahachie ISD witnessed a most unique and unprecedented (as far as I know) series of student accomplishments. Yet, in the end, it was not publicly perceived as such. There has been no attempt to repeat these events by Waxahachie or any other public or private school — yet what a handful of special students walked away from high school with because of these events is an educational lesson of revolutionary implications. To the world these events are as a well-guarded secret; they are simply unknown. To those of us who made those events possible, we are astonished they have been interpreted as something that should essentially remain unknown. In my opinion, Waxahachie has every reason to be proud of them.

via » Hard-to-Believe! High School Student Researchers? Say What? Beyond Good and Evil.