About The Author

Jocelyn Jolayne D’Arkos

The following are excerpts from the cover of THE SPLENDOR OF LEARNING.

Jocelyn Jolayne D’Arkos, former teacher, camp counselor, social worker

is mainly a humanitarian. She has been closely associated with children all of
her life, their problems, the injustices they endured, the hopelessness of parents
in educational matters became her concern. First there was the investigation and
then the solution. It was a colossal self-assigned task of private research.

During twenty years of social work, never once did she have a delinquent

child who was a good student, yet many of them had brilliant minds.

This seemed too incredible, so the searchfor the right approach began.

Her idea has not been to place blame but to find an answer; not to condone laziness, indifference, poor learning habits and no morality, but to make it possible to overcome weaknesses.

With her positive attitude of beginning education at the spot the student is found, hundreds of “hopeless” cases have come to know THE SPLENDOR OF LEARNING. In every instance it was her new approach that made the difference. Success made possible on any level was the key to opening the valves of learning.

Often children are tested and the verdict is: They could if they would. Mrs. D’Arkos believes that: they would if they could. That is her firm belief and proves it.

Each year, over fifteen hundred people have found their way to Stonecroft since 1953, to find an answer to their education problems. Stonecroft is not a school, as such. It is an experience. It is where a way is found to reach every child regardless of the learning problem. A point of beginning is established and then the parent or teacher continues with intermittent return for more instructions. All this without charge! If anyone is anxious to make it right, all she asks is to pass it on, to help another child who needs it. Many parents and teachers are doing just that. They report the same success as achieved at Stonecroft.

Mrs. D’Arkos believes that education is a continuing experience and children should be inspired for this eventuality. Children should be given a way to satisfy the basic instinct, the participation of knowledge, by teaching them how to use the capacious ability of the mind. Giving them the tools, reading and writing, gives them the freedom for self-expression, another basic instinct.

Stonecroft began in North Adams, Michigan after Mrs. D’Arkos retired from the Detroit Public Schools and was operated until she was in her nineties. Mrs. D’Arkos used the current technology of the day to inspire her students, the tape recorder and the typewriter. ILC uses her concept of “beginning education at the spot the student is” as the basis for all of their products. As a Stonecroft alumnus, Bill Tudor is now passing on, with current technology, the concepts