| | History: How it All Got Started  Joan and Larry Bangs have enjoyed taking the road less traveled and have received great satisfaction from their route. Their trek began when they were in Bennington, Vermont. Larry was studying for his doctorate in astrophysics at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute. Joan was a busy wife and mother of four. They enjoyed taking evening rides with the children on their bicycles, and mom and dad on the tandem. This culminated in a six-week bicycle trip in Europe during the summer of 1967. This trip set the stage for a new venture in all of their lives. Back home in Vermont the Bangs family moved to a 500-acre farm near the Canadian border. There they began homeschooling their children and their youngest was born. Larry and Joan believe children should enjoy and understand nature, that they should be able to think for themselves and be self-sufficient. The bicycle became a classroom. With their students, they have bicycled the length of Vermont several times, along the Mississippi River visiting Civil War battlefields, all around New England, and in Europe for 93 days with their family of 6, and 12 teenage boys and girls.  In 1971, Larry and Joan started Wildridge Academy. At Wildridge, the school day was divided into two sections, technical and non-technical. Science and mathematics were studied in the morning, and English, literature, history and language in the afternoon. This style of education did not change with the state certification of Wildridge Academy. They simply added more people around the dining room table which produced longer discussions over lunch and expanded the group of people on the bicycle trips. The academy developed a cross-country running team and cross-country ski team that did very well in competition with other schools around the state.  As their children grew older and went off to college, Wildridge took more students from the local community, along with boarding students from Vermont, Austria, and Canada. Their students have won many state wide honors for projects at National History Day. They have participated in Congressional Youth Leadership Conferences in Washington, D.C., and won bronze medals in the Junior National Biathlon in California in 1989. At Wildridge, ordinary people came to learn to excel academically and athletically. One third of the students from Wildridge have degrees from Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Harvard, Middlebury, Princeton, and Williams, and most of the rest have graduated from major universities. Larry and Joan now have a new adventure. They are focusing their efforts on developing multimedia computer programs based on the Wildridge curriculum, which they call A Bigger World. Their new company is appropriately called Wildridge Software, Inc. |  |
