My favorite single quote about how schools should treat their students (and our kids) came from Eleanor Acheson, mother of Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson. In the early part of the last century, the younger Acheson was a student — barely — at the Groton School, whose Headmaster was the legendary Endicott Peabody. Peabody, frustrated at Acheson’s independence and resistance to authority, told Acheson’s mother that he doubted “we can make a Groton boy out of him” and perhaps she should find another school for him. Mrs. Acheson replied, “I am not asking you to make a Groton boy of him. I am asking you to educate him.”
So the younger Dean stayed and, despite Peabody’s inability to shape him to Groton specs, managed to lead a fairly successful life as Secretary of State, architect of a post-World War II diplomatic and defense structure that ultimately (and bloodlessly) brought down the Soviet Union, and eminent Wise Man to many Presidents. No doubt this shocked many a Groton Don, more aware of how the teenage Acheson missed Groton’s mark than what was so special and unique to the boy who would become the most brilliant of all American diplomats.
In its concern with what a “Groton boy” (the school became co-ed in 1975) should be like, Peabody’s philosophy is consistent with most prep schools today, each of which has its own distinct personality within an admittedly narrow range of the educational spectrum. Most see this as a competitive advantage, which is increasingly necessary in the prep school market because they’re competing not just against other secondary schools but against college and even future grad school for finite educational dollars. If you’re a parent, you want to know what you’re getting, and you want a sense that your child will fit, so — when boarding tuition can top $30,000 a year — a certain clarity and consistency within each school isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But it’s not enough, nor is the promise that each child will have a better shot at getting into a good college (in part because college admissions officers are veering away from prep schools). The current trend among private schools is more. More exotic programs (more study abroad, more immersive language courses, more intense science curricula), more glitzy resources (high tech infrastructure, athletic facilities), more high-profile outreach. But the focus is still the institution and the history and tradition which support its prestige. There might be varying degrees of freedom for each student to pick and choose from the various goodies available, but at the end, it’s still about the institution — about making Groton/ Andover/ Exeter/ St. Pauls/ Hotchkiss boys and girls.
Which is pretty much counter to current innovation trends of education, which are all about individualizing education. In New York City, for example, former Education Commissioner Joel Klein established a pilot program called The School of One to use technology to develop individualized curricula for students and to assess how well they responded to different modes of instruction; if one particular method worked especially well one day, they’d be able to make changes in how the student was taught the very next. Taken to its logical conclusion, that means students wouldn’t ultimately be assessed in terms of how they respond to specific methods of instruction, but more broadly on how well they’re learning and how well they’re becoming the students they’re capable of being.
I went to one of the aforementioned prep schools (Andover), and it has a new Headmaster who, presumably, has his own vision of how the school needs to evolve. What I’d love — LOVE — to hear him say is this: We believe every child we admit is special and unique. We need to act on that belief — in fact, we need to make it the lodestar of everything we do. Our goal, starting today, is to find what’s most special about each of our students — their strengths, their passions, how they think and learn. And we’ll build on those special qualities, we’ll serve them. We’re going to stop caring so much about whether our kids meet our standards and start obsessing about how we can meet and exceed theirs.
This is important because schools like Andover have the resources to lead this wave of educational innovation and the prestige to make new ideas stick. Innovation happens this way: leaders spend money, try, fail and learn, and what they ultimately come up with can then be disseminated broadly and affordably. It’s important for this kind of individualization to continue, because right now a lot of public schools — faced with the need to maintain political support in harsh budgetary times — have gone the other way, toward mass teaching methods and mass standardized testing. Given an economy which increasingly values the distinct, the special, and the creative, that’s a terrible way to educate kids, but it’s what lots of school districts are doing.
So somebody has to lead, to show not just how to evaluate and educate kids in terms of their differences and strengths, but to make it viable, important, accepted, and even prestigious. I’d love to see my old school try.
