The End of Education, or “What Does the finished product look like?”
Grateful acknowledgement is given to Jon Pless for inviting me to speak with you today. As an academic, I am accustomed to speaking in blocks of time that range between 45 and 55 minutes. Please sit back and relax. We’ve got plenty of time.
[Michelangelo Lodovico di Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor. Here’s what he said:]
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.
As a head of school, my principal job is to vision. There’s strategic planning, budgeting, short and long term maintenance documentation, staffing, building usage, and so on. But perhaps the most important part of the visioning process is one that I share with almost anyone who bothers to think about it.
That visioning involves “the finished product”. In other words, after a child has finished the prescribed course of study, what does this student look like?
So if you are a mom or dad, or if you are involved in the training and nurturing of young people, or if you are mentoring a new hire at your business, or if you’re on the endangered species list as a manufacturer, you too are trying to envision the finished product.
Now I recognize that there is a wonderful side track we could take with this thesis: that life is not a destination, but a journey. That a student or new-hire is never really a finished product. That the journey IS the destination. And all that type of thinking iS fun and true. But it is also true that every journey has waypoints, stopping points, side trips, and pitfalls. And my observations today have to do with the particular waypoint that is characterized by a graduation.
I think this is a worthy question for all academic institutions. At the terminal point (in our case it is currently 8th grade) what do I want my graduates to look like? And what I hope to offer to you today is this: perhaps you can take this perspective on schooling and glean something from it that might be useful to you in your journey. If you can, hooray for both of us! If you can’t, well . . . at least I pocketed a few happy dollars to put in the pot on Jon’s behalf! So let’s get started:
Your second grade teacher had you answer the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. I have no idea how many of you said that you wanted to be working in an office. Probably no one, although I bet most of you do (or have done) a lot of office work. I’m also guessing that whatever you said in second grade bears little relationship to what you are actually doing with your life today. (I could be wrong, but this room isn’t brimming over with firefighters and police.)
When I was in second grade I wanted to be a proud member of the United States Marine Corps, but I also wanted to run the street sweeping machine that came down our road once in a while! Neither of those things happened.
What did happen is that I became a headmaster with a wife and three children . . . with LOTS of really interesting twists and turns in between. And as a dad AND and educator, I have given a great deal of thought to this idea of the end product.
So the title of today’s talk, “The End of Education” isn’t suggesting that schooling is screeching to a halt, but rather that the point of education (its “end”) has some sort of importance that ought to be considered once in a while . . . beyond, or at a depth that exceeds, simply the next step in life (“you know, like, getting accepted to a good college or finding a job”)
Now when I look at this question as a father, I am reassured at where my values really lie! Lillian, my eldest, a 27 year old church-going honors graduate of William and Mary, is the art director for a powerhouse advertising firm. She’s in love with a good boy, an assistant principal of a magnet school in Buffalo, NY, who wants to be a college basketball coach one day. This makes me happy. She’s making a good living, doing work she likes to do, and she’s a moral young lady responding to God’s call in her life.
Caroline, a 24 year old church-going honors graduate of the College of Charleston, is teaching at Charleston Collegiate, a prep school on Johns Island. She’s an accomplished flautist, engaged to a good boy who works with turtles at the South Carolina aquarium and plays jazz guitar. This makes me happy. She’s making a good living, doing work she likes to do, and she’s a moral young lady responding to God’s call in her life.
My last child, my “caboose” is Hank. He’s just 13 years old and is in the 8th grade at All Saints. He’s a good writer, a good public speaker, active in our church, he’s athletic, a boy scout who has finished all the requirements for 1st class rank with Troop 91, and is a dancer in “Camp Rock” that opens tonight! Hank makes me happy . . . so far.
[This is like that line from the Simpson’s movie when Bart complains to his father “Dang, Dad. This is the worst day of my life.” Consoling him, Homer says, “The worst day of your life so far.”]
My point is, that while I would never say Lillian’s or Caroline’s education has ended, I would say that they have already completed significant waypoints, like graduation and finding jobs, that have helped to complete a vision, a values-driven vision, that I’m apparently holding. Hank, on the other hand, is clearly still in process, like the rest of my students at All Saints.
Our mission declares that we will prepare students academically (well, duh. We’re a school! And for heaven’s sake we’re an Episcopal School. We’re the ones who rejoice in repeating that Jesus died to take away our sins, not our brains). So, we will prepare students academically, morally, socially, and physically in a diverse Christian environment.
But when they graduate in that glorious commencement ceremony next May, what do we want them to look like?
And it seems to me that the real goals of education, the truly important ones, the ones that endure for a lifetime, can’t be neatly summed up in curriculum benchmarks or by merely publishing standardized test results. And ladies and gentlemen, we are at a time in history when schooling . . . in its very familiar form . . . is changing at an unimaginable rate of speed.
Let me give you just one example out of literally hundreds: The school library (or even a community library) doesn’t need space to store encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other heavy reference books. Why not? Well, most of us carry the world’s largest reference library on our belts or in our pockets! Progressive libraries have responded well to this change: the idea of freeing up real estate in the reference section to provide glassed-wall meeting spaces with full digital connectivity has resulted in phenomenal collaborative learning at the high school and university levels. People want to be collaborative; they want to be connected. The glass walled rooms are part of a library movement called “public anonymity”. This new internal architecture is receiving rave reviews.
There is an emotional connection, however, that most people share with things like books, and ink, and pencils, and writing in cursive and memorizing the capitals of each state. As a headmaster I hear this emotional connection every day: “I just think it’s important to hold a book, to smell its pages, feel it. I just don’t want a Kindle for my child.” Or, “I just think it’s just terrible that children aren’t graded in penmanship”. These statements of “I just think it’s important for whatever reason” are valid, but it is vital, absolutely vital, that every part of schooling needs to be evaluated for its enduring qualities.
Do you think it’s important for every third grader to have the times tables memorized through the 12’s? I do. We do at All Saints. But Why? Really? And am I seduced into temporizing about the need for advanced memory work rather than grasping the mechanical process of repeated addition that yields multiplication? (And why stop at the 12’s if it’s so important?) If I argue for cursive writing, can I really support it as a means of literary and aesthetic expression, or will I bail out to a nearby argument regarding fine motor skills. My friends, there is strong emotion connected with these issues. The emotional component cannot be ignored, but again I would argue that at this point, especially at this point in history, with the digital world literally at our fingertips, the enduring issues of schooling are not going to be found in a table of contents or the answer key to a test. Perhaps they never were.
When I look at the end product I see a girl who knows how to stand up straight, to look another in the eye and tell the truth. I see a boy who has decent manners and can express himself verbally and in writing. I see students who not only have the academic skills necessary to succeed in the challenges that life will give them, but the moral compass and intellectual curiosity that keeps them truly alive.
I think you can see where I’m going with this, so I’m going to pause. I need to make something VERY clear: I am not opposed to memorizing times tables or cursive writing or learning that Austin is the capital of Texas. This is not my point at all. In fact, I’m usually in FAVOR of these things. What IS my point is that in every nurturing, mentoring, guiding, teaching, learning moment, we ought to be asking WHY in terms of the finished product. Just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done.
And I’ll tell you this: I don’t want highly trained, academically brilliant graduates of All Saints using their training for immoral purposes. Human history is rife with such examples: gosh, what can we do with this new invention? I know, we’ll make a weapon!
So, to sum up, it seems to me that the End of Education is to serve our moral nature. All Saints Episcopal School operates in a Christian environment. We intentionally, like every independent school that I know of, teach morality. We have a core values program of 6 virtues that are emphasized each of the six grading periods: Service, Tolerance, Achievement, Integrity, Respect, and Spirituality. We have an honor code and an honor council, morning devotions and the pledge of allegiance. Weekly chapels. And why do we do these things?
Because we believe that every child has infinite value and infinite possibilities in responding to God’s unique call to him or her. At All Saints, we live this way every day. Remember Michelangelo’s idea? Every block of stone has a statue inside of it? The sculptor’s job is to let it out! That’s why we’re here.
