While the national country-day-school movement is over 150 years old, a surge of new independent day schools emerged for the GI Generation’s kids (the baby boomers) in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, we now have a wave of NAIS-member day schools celebrating their 50th anniversaries, which makes this an appropriate time to muse about what it means — for independent schools, at any rate — to hit the half-century mark.
For one thing, we’ve learned a lot about teaching and learning in the last 50 years. In particular, our early childhood educators and primary grade teachers have become expert — and, thus, great role models — in engaging young children’s innate curiosity, imagination, and creativity. They’ve become masters at capitalizing upon young people’s intrinsic desire to explore and learn. They know that teaching the skills students need is best facilitated by putting interesting problems and objects in the pathway of young children, then letting them imagine solutions and uses.
For proof of the rich results of inquiry-based teaching, one need look no further than what happens when teachers ask preschool and primary grade kids interesting questions. (Wasn’t that also the organizing principle for higher-level teaching 2,500 years ago, in Socrates’ approach?) For any school celebrating its semi-centennial, for example, I’d recommend asking the youngest children, “What does it mean to be 50?” I guarantee that the children’s divergent thinking and creative answers will delight you (and you’ll have enough material to use in publications for months to come). It’s important to contextualize the question, of course, to avoid embarrassing results, like those when my daughter Brooke was in the second grade. Upon her veteran teacher’s birthday, the teacher asked her students to guess her age — and the average guess was 117. Better frames to stimulate creative thinking at this level will produce hilarious but interesting results, like those of the teacher who asked her second graders to write letters to God. Here are just some of these responses:
• Dear God: I think the stapler is one of your greatest inventions. — Ruth
• Dear God: Please put in another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now. — Ginny
• Dear God: I bet it is very hard for you to love everybody in the world. There are four people in my family, and I can’t do it. — Nan
• Dear God: If you let the dinosaurs not be extinct, we would not have a country. You did the right thing. — Jonathan
• Dear God: Did you mean for the giraffe to look like that or was it an accident? — Norma
• Dear God: Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you have now? — Jane
• Dear God: You don’t have to worry about me. I always look both ways. — Dean
What’s liberating for independent schools is that we can ask students to think about big questions — existential and spiritual — even in nonsectarian schools. What intrigues me about the second graders’ letters to God is that they are not only refreshingly creative but also surprisingly intellectually astute, demonstrating that they think about and struggle with the deepest theological questions: If God is omniscient, omnipresent, and all-powerful, how do we understand God’s choices, how do we thank God for the blessings bestowed, and implore for some more of them?
Similarly creative early childhood and primary grade teachers liberate the imagination of their students by giving them only the first half of proverbs to see how the children would complete them, with results such as…
• You can’t teach an old dog… math.
• When the blind lead the blind… get out of the way.
• If at first you don’t succeed… get new batteries.
So, my first observation upon the extraordinary success of many independent schools as they close in upon their first 50 years is that we must celebrate and build upon our hard-won successes as we imagine schools in the next 50 years. To that end, our middle and secondary school can take some important lessons from our elementary schools — in particular, that student learning should be centered on discovery, inquiry, exploration, imagination, and creativity. The research is clear: middle school and secondary school programs today need as much creativity in teaching and learning as we find in lower schools. In too many schools in America (with their “drill and kill” obsession with testing), the creativity fostered in lower schools is squelched in later years. The result is that students not only miss out on deep engagement with learning, but that creativity and divergent thinking decline in absolute terms by the time students graduate from secondary school, while standardization and conformity, sadly, become the norm.
My second observation is related to the founding conditions for many great schools. With the odds of failure high and the visionaries few in number, the start-up of most schools is precarious, emerging from the collision of a need (for high-quality, college-prep education in the area), a dream by a small core of committed parents and community leaders, and a prayer that all the stars would align to make this happen. And to say that the early years of most independent schools were dependent on the faith in the vision and the dedication of the pioneer parents, leaders, and teachers — despite less-than-ideal conditions, resources, and facilities — would be a gross understatement. But isn’t such a convergence of a need, a dream, and a prayer, against unfavorable odds, the way all great initiatives happen — including the very founding of our country? So, it’s worth noting and celebrating, and then teaching to our students, the impact of courageous risk-taking for a noble purpose.
A third observation is that we need to pay attention to the spectrum — the continuum of organizational vulnerability to organizational sustainability — over time. Before Jim Collins authored Good to Great, a leadership assessment of great organizations and the principles they have in common and upon which they distinguish themselves from the pack, he wrote Built to Last. That book examines a handful of Fortune 500 companies that always seem to prevail in the marketplace over many decades (Sony, Nordstrom, Johnson & Johnson, Disney, etc.). His list made me wonder what the longevity numbers look like for independent schools, those that have not only endured but prevailed over 50 years or more, compared to Fortune 500 Companies. To that end, I asked an NAIS staff member to do the research, and here’s what we discovered about the durability of schools:
• Over 300 years old: NAIS-member schools founded in 1600s: 6 (vs. 0 Fortune 500 companies)
• Over 200 years old: NAIS-member schools founded in 1700s: 32 (vs. 3 Fortune 500 companies)
• Over 100 years old: NAIS-member schools founded in 1800s: 229 (vs. 157 Fortune 500 companies)
• Over 50 years old: NAIS-member schools founded before 1961: 353 (vs. 294 Fortune 500 companies).
While the world’s great companies can take pride in the fact that they are “built to last,” I’d say the world’s great independent schools can make the same claim. And for those schools that have just crossed the threshold of the 50-year mark, I’d note that — just like the actuarial tables for human lifespans where, once you hit 50, your chances of living to be 100 go way up — the same outcome seems to apply to great independent schools. Once a school hits 50, its chances of living forever improve dramatically.
There’s an important caveat, of course, to this prediction of permanence: One’s continued success depends upon school leaders, parents, alumni, students, and donors making an ongoing commitment to building the school and its brand, and that the school evolves to meet the rapidly changing expectations for what schools should do and how they should operate. But a special word is due regarding the central role of investing in teachers, and in the environment in which they teach, to guarantee the future of the enterprise. The premise boils down to what has always been true from Socrates on: Without great teachers, there are no great schools. Is there anyone who hasn’t had at least one teacher who significantly influenced his or her life, perhaps even changing the course of it? In great schools, we expect many such teachers. My prediction is that schools will need to sustain and increasingly recruit — as our boomer teachers retire — the next generation of great teachers in order to make certain our schools remain “built to last.”
How will the next generation of great teachers apply their craft? By doing what our current generation of great teachers are already increasingly doing: making the Big Shift from teacher-centric to student-centric, from one-size-fits-all to customized teaching and learning, and from students as passive recipients of knowledge to students as active co-creators of knowledge.
And what will we teach in the schools of the future? The skills and values that the 21st century will demand and reward are the Five C’s: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, and character. It’s evident to me that independent schools already have a lock on the character piece, where “values are the value-added.” And it’s clear from our placement records and comparative test scores that independent schools also have a lock on teaching critical thinking skills. While we continue our tradition in these areas, all of our schools must also make certain that we commit as deeply to the remaining three C’s — instilling proficiency and mastery in communication, collaboration, and creativity.
As I travel the country and the world speaking on these topics, it is gratifying to note that schools are investing in teaching and coaching and in the artistic environment (the campus). If they continue to do this right, independent schools can be certain that, in 50 more years, their current students’ grandchildren will be there, celebrating the school’s centennial.