What does academic rigor really mean? Thoughts on challenge and necessity

by Alex Myers, Director

I find it challenging to describe academics at The Mountain School. Typically, the word that’s been deployed is “rigorous.” We are a school with academic rigor. I’ve never particularly liked this descriptor – perhaps in part because the only other context in which I think of the word rigor is “rigor mortis.” And, maybe unfairly, I associate those two instances of rigor. Academic rigor makes me think of stiffness, of calcification, of the canon (and nothing but)… and that’s not The Mountain School.

Yet, I want to lay claim to the idea that “academic rigor” reaches for: the sense that academics are present, challenging, engaging, necessary, and more.

The word I want to use is demanding. I like its Latin roots, in particular that it means to ask. Academics at The Mountain School are demanding; they ask of students to listen up, to speak back, to think deeply, to write and revise, to go for a long walk to figure it out.

To be fair, rigor applies to The Mountain School as well, but maybe not as much in academics as in other places. We are stiff about getting up in the morning, rigid in the expectation that you will do the dishes. Unmovable in getting out to work on the farm, rain or shine.

A day at The Mountain School makes you tired – that’s because of the rigor. A day at The Mountain School makes you energized – that’s because of the demand. By dorm check-in, you are exhausted and also buzzing with ideas.

The conflict I feel over the word rigor extends farther into the question of how we explain The Mountain School to prospective students and their families. I hear students say: I came to The Mountain School because I wanted to take a break. That doesn’t sound like rigor; it sounds like being on vacation.

But The Mountain School is a break – it isn’t a schedule packed with athletics and music groups and clubs and tutoring. It isn’t a constant barrage of social media and advertising. It isn’t streets teeming with strangers or lunch with the same group of friends who have known you for years. It is something entirely else. So, yes, it is taking a break. But break as in a fissure; The Mountain School is disruptive.

I think that this disruption is crucial to the type of rigor you find at The Mountain School. In part, our program is demanding because it is unfamiliar. Students are used to “the grind” – even if they don’t like it, they are conditioned to submit themselves to it, to grind themselves to dust in order to achieve the positions, grades, and placements that they have been told will mark them as successful (or, worse, as good enough).

When students are removed from this structure – when the grindstones stop spinning – and arrive at The Mountain School, there follows a period of utter disorientation. They are asked to do things that they have never done before (split wood), or things that they consider beneath them (sweep a floor), or things that they feel are disgusting (shovel compost), and they are shown that these tasks are necessary, needed, and must be done by them and done well.

Soon, a new structure comes into place.

But unlike the grind, it is a structure that they build. We give them the blocks with which to build, but they put it together. That is The Mountain School’s version of rigor – firm expectations, challenges that are physical and communal as well as intellectual, demands with tangible outcomes that are relied upon by others.

Another way to put it: there’s a shorter vista here. The program is only four months, but that’s not exactly what I mean. The rigor – the demand – of this place comes from the end line being discernible.

The grind focuses on college, on career, on a sort of outcome one can never truly touch.

The Mountain School focuses on today. There is this dish crew. There is this discussion. There is that crop to harvest. It must be done, and done well, and done right now. We are school of intimacy and immediacy. Not hurried, not a rush. But here in the present moment. No interface of screens, no working towards next year. That shorter frame makes The Mountain School more insistent.

So, yes, rigor is a word that applies to The Mountain School. But, like many things here, it can’t be deployed without examination and explanation. Rigor with a footnote. Rigor with an asterisk. Rigor with a shape molded by the farm, the forest, the kitchen, and the all-abiding present moment, as much as by any book, paper, exam, or classroom.

Learn more about experiential academics.

Learn more about the essential co-curricular programming.

Learn more about the philosophy of shared labor.