July  15, 2025

 

Bob & Nancy Love

131 South Morningside

Wichita, KS  67218

 

Dear Co-laborer with Becky Elder,

 

Becky is back in Wichita after 8 weeks at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. She continues working at rehab with the same grit and grace that she applied to every challenge every day of her life. For an update, follow the links at https://www.suncomlib.org/becky which still serves as both a portal into the dynamics of her personal life as well as a newsletter on the continuation of her public work encouraging us all to be who we 

ARE — Agri-culturists, Readers and Educators.

 

It is with respect to Becky’s public work that I offer this insight as mid-summer 2025 lingers.  As you may [not] know, Becky’s Dad [Robert D. Love] had a public life in which he was well known for his dedication to “private schools” [both primary and secondary] which were new to many in the 1960’s. But did you know that conventional private schools have been surpassed in both number and sacrificial involvement — first by “home schools” beginning in the 1980’s and now by “micro schools”? Think about that for a moment. What was happening from 1960 thru today that has driven such clear and significant changes in education from public to private to home then back to micro? Is it how families are coping with the decline of the middle class?

 

If you think of micro schools as small, low-budget, no-frills private schools composed of aspiring teachers and laboring families that want more for kids than public or home schools but who cannot “enter” the high-octane world of conventional, now-5-digit-tuition private schools, you would be partly right. But there is something more and exciting about micro schools that we are only beginning to understand: “the commons”..

 

By the commons, I mean the realization that a school — or a library or a garden or whatever is vital in the cosmos — cannot be defined, legislated or marketed but must “emerge” from the midst those who love and labor together in its name:

“Emergence occurs when a complex entity exhibits properties that its parts do not have and cannot intend on their own but only when they interact as a whole.”

 

In his later years, reflecting on what he learned [and taught Becky] about schools, Robert D. Love said it this way — which is recounted and explained in the Epilogue [supplied by his family] to the 50th anniversary edition of his 1973 book “How to Start Your Own School”:

“The only way to run a school is to run it independently of everyone but students, parents and teachers. Period. … Education is learning, living and teaching."

 

Becky has lived out this principle of emergence in plain sight: personal involvement. It takes courage and sacrifice to step up … and it risks failure and disappointment if nobody shows up … but it is the only way to gain what none of us can have alone. As we carry on Becky’s work in Agriculture, Reading and Education, why not do more than “your part” — BE PART of something bigger than yourself … bigger than us all. Send your love and prayers to Becky and send your money to me. Let’s believe in and return to the commons which Becky still loves. Until then,

 

Bob Love, Northfield School of the Liberal Arts