“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: The American Prep School Tradition. Our schools have a long and great legacy, and it is the work of all of us who love them and
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care for them to both carry forward that tradition while also continuing to innovate to meet the educational demands of the new century.  We have many duties to achieve on behalf of our schools:

To fulfill a unique mission. We must take care that our schools head 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 educator Peter Elbow writes, 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 unwaveringly high and student care and concern are similarly insistently pursued. The golden mean can be the shorthand for this grand synthesis and reconciliation of subject and student. 

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 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 even sometimes comprehensive, ‘survey’ textbooks, we play our part in passing along the great heritage of cultures and peoples, from Euclid to Einstein, from Timbuktu to Taiwan.  Despite what can be a gratingly polemical tone, E.D. Hirsch is correct when he reminds us of how much we communicate via the channels and interpret via the lenses of innumerably cultural allusions, and how much we all an gain by a mastery of what he calls ‘core knowledge.’

To empower our students as learners and thinkers. 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 teachers such as Ted Sizer in his Horace books.

To honor our teachers as professionals and scholars.  We ask so much from them, 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 else 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 students, teaching, and curriculum. 

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 grandness of the larger world.  As we learn from the wider world, we must reflect upon, and act upon, our responsibility to it: as we serve, we must reflect upon the learning we subsequently acquire.

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 twentyfirst 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 themselves and prepare themselves not just for tomorrow’s children, for our children’s children. 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.”