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Guidelines
Legacy
 
The aim of this site is to celebrate the values of Finchden, it's founder, philosophy, experience and creative output.
Someone jokingly said that you could never describe Finchden, because you would get 50 different interpretations. The truth is that it probably is the best way to describe it. The accumulated impression would retain a more vital explaination than any dry academic assessment by interpreters who never attended the place.
The Finchden experience was essentially a creative one. It had no rules or curiculum. It did not judge, rather it valued others. You were free to find out what responsibility meant. "The ability to respond" or "learning to take a hint" as Chief would say, was a key appeal - in the end an essential response if you are to grow and develop valid relationships.
To find oneself in a unique situation were you were not constantly reminded by those things that you were once condemmed by, meant that far more time was spent being appreciated and engaged with. Without engagement there is no interaction, without interaction there is no growth. And one of the main things the Chief was interested in was internal growth.
To disolve the impediments to this growth was Chiefs great gift. Personal evolution could only really happen in a creative atmosphere.
Since the re-emergance of a Finchden Community, it is becomeing clear that this sense of creativity is being challenged by moves to psychologise and and to some degree conditionalise the Finchden experience. There is an increase in predjudice, marginalisation and exclusiveness. There is an increasing sense that the experience is something that can be owned, used an agent for self promotion or turned into a kind of psychological theme park at the expense of it's original distributed creative values and integrity.
The challenge here is to go a stage further than recycling the anecdotes and apocryphal stories, as delightful and amusing as they are. The challenge is for Finchdonians to throughly re-examine the experience and place themselves at the heart of it, instead of merely being recipients of the experience as was served by the Chief and the staff. It lays the foundation for it's legacy.
This site invites Finchdonians to contribute their personal account of their experience at Finchden. Gudelines can be found here.