My first draft of this Editor’s Note was a long jag about today’s popular music — how hollow most of it feels to me. But then I remembered that it makes little sense to fuss over popular music that way. It’s just a commercial undertaking, like the selling of donuts. Young people of any generation eat the stuff up.
It occurred to me afterwards that what prompted my complaint is a more general wish for a strong counterbalance to such forces in society. Maybe it has always been this way, but it seems to me that such forces loom larger, exert more influence than ever. It may be too much to say that we need to protect children from the emptiness of the consumer life, but we can give them the space they need to see the world, and their place it in, more clearly. At least, this is what I want for my own children.
I’m well aware that many independent school educators are 10 steps ahead of me here. Every day, they work at the intersection of educational ideals and cultural anxiety. They know what children need for healthy development. They constantly assess what they are doing to help leverage healthy development. They highlight and publish the language that matters and then fight daily to bring it to life.
Sometimes, when I feel down about the state of civilization, it makes me feel better to take a virtual walk through the websites of excellent schools. The photos alone are comforting. But I like the statements of purpose, too. These are schools “where minds flourish” or where, through the example of their lives, children are expected to “contribute to justice and understanding in the world.” I find educators who want their graduates to be “joyful, resilient, life-long learners.”
Matt Goldman, co-founder of Blue School in New York City, puts his school’s quest this way, “We want to create the kind of educational program we wish we’d had for ourselves and dreamed we’d have for our children; a place where people feel like there is genuinely no better place to learn and to grow.”
One might dismiss this language as “market-speak,” but I don’t. The best are expressions of deep belief and commitment. But it’s never an easy undertaking. The irony in naming the early years of education “elementary,” is that they are not even close to being elementary — if we define the word as “simple,” or “basic.” The term “primary school” might be better because it suggests that these years in school are foundational — years upon which one builds a quality life in a tumultuous world. But they are immensely complex years all around.
In this issue, we turn the spotlight on the early years of learning, especially the challenge of schools to define their missions in a rapidly shifting cultural landscape, then follow through on these missions. But it’s not just what we do in school that matters to these writers. It’s also how we conduct ourselves, how we relate to and work with each other. As Neal Brown, head of Green Acres School (Maryland), puts it, this work is as much pastoral as it is academic.