Saturday, January 02, 2010

Alexander Bernstein

I wonder if Alex Bernstein knows that it was I who created and moderates the Leonard Bernstein page on Myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/leonard_bernstein

1 comment:

My Daily Struggles said...

Alexander Bernstein, who is a former teacher at the Packer-Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, is now Director of the Bernstein Family Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to encouraging the love of learning by means of the arts.

Asked why his father, Leonard Bernstein, was such a master teacher, Alexander Bernstein said, "It could have come from the rabbinical tradition in our family. He seemed to teach in everything he did-not in a didactic way-but he was always trying to share something he felt was important. Also, he was so open to every influence and wanted to learn more himself, which is a quality of a great teacher."

"Central to my father's teaching," Alexander Bernstein said in an interview, "was his belief that education be concerned not merely with imparting received knowledge, but in cultivating a lifelong appetite for new discovery. In particular he was keen to demonstrate that the life processes of the arts both draw on and illuminate learning in a variety of academic disciplines."

Questioned what he, Alexander Bernstein, has in common with his father, Bernstein said, "I think the love of learning and teaching. I know I got a deep sense of social justice from him."

To this end, the Bernstein Family Foundation Fund has been active both in New York and nationally, concentrating particularly on the Leonard Bernstein Center for Education Through the Arts.

The goal of the Leonard Bernstein Center is to research, develop, and sustain school practices that are inspired by Bernstein's legacy as an artist, teacher, and scholar and to support a new approach to education that fosters a life-long love of learning in all children.