June, 2008

“A demanding curriculum designed for all [combined] with personal attention within small scale environments.” So Art Powell succinctly captures the essential formula of our independent school tradition in his somewhat unfortunately titled, but terrifically telling, book Lessons from Privilege. Our schools have a long and great legacy, and it is the work of all of us who love them and care for them to both carry forward that tradition while also continuing to innovate to meet the educational demands of the new century. To best carry forward this great tradition, the following responsibilities should be carefully implemented by a school’s leadership and faculty:

To fulfill a unique mission. We must take care that our schools heed the call to ‘know thyself.’ We must always seek to know what it is that our particular school has set out to achieve; we must examine whether we are doing so, and we must chart a forward course to further enact that mission.

To educate in the fashion of the ‘golden mean.’ As the under-appreciated educational philosopher Peter Elbow wrote, we must Embrace Contraries by simultaneously teaching the subject and teaching the student: we must hold the highest standards of subject mastery while also striving for the highest quality of student support and encouragement. At our best schools, we find educational excellence in the place where academic standards are as unwaveringly high as the standard of care and concern for the individual student’s human development.

To foster a diverse community of mutual support, appreciation, and respect. Our schools must seek vigorously to know our students as wonderfully unique individuals, and consistently provide them the tools and opportunities to truly ‘connect’ with both their fellow students and with the adults of the school. We should seek to engage our students such that they form, all of them, a true and deep sense of belonging, even ownership of their school. Ideally we hope that everyone with a school will be known to each other by name and distinctive qualities, and we strive to ensure no one is overlooked, no one is lost. Each individual, we hope, will be guided in self knowledge, in emotional intelligence, in mutual respect, and in taking increasingly responsibility for their surroundings and their fellows. Our schools must be full of heart.

To empower our students as active learners, thinkers, and leaders. More so than ever before, the graduates of our schools will need to be lifelong learners and powerfully analytical thinkers; we must enable our students to ‘construct’ much of their understanding through critical inquiry, cooperative learning, demonstrations, and the types of ‘essential’ teaching tools that we gather from inspirational educators such as Ted Sizer in his Horace books. The Coalition of Essential Schools has it exactly right: it is essential that we educate via small classes, personal relationships, high expectations, and through empowering our students to be independent researchers and presenters, such that they take responsibility for what is, after all, their own learning. We must empower our students too to be active participants in the direction of their school and the development of their own leadership skills of organizing, public speaking, and ethical decision-making.

To learn and serve ‘beyond the walls’. Whether by tramping through a nearby stream, rappelling down a rock wall in a far-off mountain range, nailing up a new drywall in a dilapidated city block, or zooming across the world wide web, our schools must ensure that their wonderful smallness intersects frequently with the largeness of the greater world. Students must venture out to encounter and tackle challenges classrooms simply can never provide; exploring the Great Outdoors instills in our students a worldview encompassing confidence, reverence, and responsibility. As we learn from the wider world, we must reflect upon, and act upon, our responsibility to it, by incorporating and integrating service not as an add-on afterthought but as a core element of our schooling and learning. And, as we serve, we must facilitate a reflection upon the learning we acquire in doing so.

To convey the scholastic tradition. In just a few thousand years our world civilization has accumulated a body of knowledge and wisdom that is it our responsibility to pass to the next generation. Via study of ancient writings, primary sources, and engaging and interactive project-based education, we play our part in passing along the great heritage of cultures and peoples, from Euclid to Einstein, from Timbuktu to Taiwan.

To forge global citizens and global stewards. Never has the world been so interconnected, and accelerating rate of globalization is dizzying. Our students have many more links with citizens and corporations of other continents than in the past, and to best prepare them, we must begin to provide them these opportunities in their schooling. Connection also engenders interdependence; we must all be learning in our schools how both to experience internationalism and how to reflect upon the difficult quandaries and essential obligations of this newly “flat” earth.

To prepare our students for a fast changing world. As Pat Bassett says, we must participate in and advance upon a new educational renaissance, one which grapples with the vastly different landscape of the 21^st century and responds with an educational program that provides our students and ourselves the “whole new minds” and the critical disciplines required for a new age that privileges conceptual thinking and compassionate relationship forming.

To honor our teachers as professionals and scholars. We ask so much from our schoolteachers, and we must offer them so much in turn: they are the ones who carry out our mission and purpose in the most meaningful of ways. We respect and value the independence and unique individuality which each teacher, standing alone in the classroom, relies upon for their task of engaging and inspiring; we expect also that each teacher share in the responsibility of advancing the collective mission and school culture. We build evaluation systems that are geared for growth and empowerment, while holding each other to the highest standards of accountability. We must build ever greater systems for faculty collaboration and professional development, and include teachers in a culture of shared decision-making, especially in matters of student affairs, teaching methodology, and curriculum development.

To be a ‘civil society.’ In an increasingly atomized world, we must ‘bowl together.’ Our schools are wonderfully poised to become centers wherein we educate and connect not just our students to our teachers but also our parents, our alumni, and our neighbors. We must form and maintain the ties that bind in order to overcome the loneliness of the twenty first century crowd.

To advance as an institution. Just as our students must become life-long learners, so must our schools engage in the never-ending quest to renew and prepare themselves not just for tomorrow’s children, for our children’s children. We must be concerned for appropriate and authentic methodologies for measuring our effectiveness, as a tool for guiding us further forward. While never forgetting to respect and care for the human side of school change, we need to hold high Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot’s standard for the single essential ingredient of a ‘good school’: “the willingness to search for the origins and solutions to our imperfections.”