The End of Education

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 8^th 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 8^th 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 1^st 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.

Kinzman's latest literary work

Boots and the Mouse

I am a mouse who lives in an old barn. My particular room in this old barn is the largest room in the barn. It is the hayloft. There is only one window looking out of the hayloft, and from there I can see hills and pastures. It is very beautiful. In fact, my whole life is beautiful except for one thing. That one thing is a cat.

That cat makes me nervous. Her name, according to her owners who call her to dinner twice each day, is Boots. Boots is gray in color, but her feet are white. She is a fast runner and a very good hunter. I don’t know why she hunts. Her owners feed her. She seems well fed. I am sure that she is hunting me.

How do I know this? Every day I see her entering the barn through the big doors below my window. She stealthily moves, looking into each of the horse stalls, occasionally catching one of my cousins. She eats them. She usually eats the head first. Like I said before, she makes me feel nervous.

Sometimes I dream about catching Boots and eating her. When I wake up, though, I realize that it was just a dream. Maybe one of the horses will kick her! That would teach her not to come into the barn anymore. I just wish she would hunt somewhere other than my barn.

This morning the sun is shining and the temperature is just perfect. I’m looking out the window of the hayloft and I see Boots coming this way. Once again I feel nervous. This time she’s doing something different. She’s not looking into the stalls! She’s climbing up into my hayloft! I’d better get out of h . . .

Evolution

Evolution

We live in a wonder-world full of fascination and mystery. We often think, “Why?” and “How?” Although we search far and wide to know all the answers, we understand that we never will. But in all curiosity, it becomes clear that things do change – and the longer we live, the more apparent it becomes. Some changes are quicker than others, but slowly, things evolve. They are occurring now as in the past, and they will do so in the future. This is the real meaning of evolution. It is much more widespread than in the classic description by Charles Darwin.

One of the amazing facts that strikes me as I read the book of Genesis is how much the Creation story resembles the scientific explanations that followed, thousands of years later. Whoever wrote Genesis was totally unaware of atoms, electromagnetic energy, and all the complex mathematical formulas with which we describe our origins today. Yet that ancient description of the earth as “formless and empty” and then the beginning of light, followed by water, sounds much like the story of the scientific sequence. Genesis continues with “water…gathered in one place and dry land appear(ing)”. The Creation account goes on with the appearance of vegetation, fruit and seed, followed by “water teeming with living creatures and birds flying in the sky.” The next description is that of the land producing living creatures that move along the ground and reproduce according to their kind. Finally, “God says, ‘Let us make man in our image…and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and birds of the air, over livestock, and over all the earth.” This occurs in a matter of unknown time, but the sequence is remarkable. Remember that the word “day” in Hebrew can mean any period of time, as it can in most of our modern languages. It is ridiculous to imagine this ancient writer receiving this knowledge in modern scientific terminology. If he had, and wrote it down, no one could have understood or believe what he was saying or writing. The story would never had been told, much less understood, by anyone.

The stories in the Bible have to be understood as inspired, but written by human beings of a specific time period. This writer would not understand most of our modern words of communication. Language, communication, and terminology have all evolved and will continue to do so. The reason Jesus spoke so often in parables was to simplify a truth, not to make it more complex. We often look back on historical and ancient people as having been simple minded, but many were brilliant. They solved complex problems one by one, or we would not be here today. Future generations will no doubt look back on our society as backward and primitive because of the evolution of inevitable progress and problem-solving.

It helps to look at the immense size of the universe in order to grasp our dilemma. With the naked eye, we can see the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, about 2 million light years away. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so we are looking at a time so far in the distant past, the numbers have no real comprehension. It makes the life of a 100 year old person equal to the blink of an eye. Can you imagine how much evolution has changed things in the past and will continue to change things in the future?

If man requires a “long time” to create a masterpiece, and if man was made in God’s image, then it may have taken God a considerable period of time for his various creations. Remember that his timetable is a whole lot bigger than ours. Accept evolution as a part of the beginning and the changes on the road to infinity.

By John B. Selby, Sr.

September 2011

Here's Pigasus again!

For Selbyjr: Let's have a serious talk . . .

Trivia. Probably easy for you: from where is the excerpt below? I'd like to have a long conversation about it . . .


Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate appointments.

The priests knew what had happened, and the people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,--though he had never carried a weapon in his life,--and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer needs.

Wrestling with God

Sermon “Wrestling with God”

Henry G. Selby

All Saints’ Episcopal Church

Morristown, Tennessee

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 31, 2011

“May the words of my mouth and the mediation of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” AMEN.

The topic for today is blessings! Here’s a made-up story: Tom was a 34 year old computer programmer who had unresolved issues with his father, a diagnosed workaholic who was cold, distant, and who never really seemed to love anyone or anything. Tom was married, had a reasonably high paying job, and two sons of his own. He looked successful. And he was resolved not to have a dysfunctional relationship with his wife and children in the pattern of his own family of origin. But when the patterns established by his first family began to emerge in his own behaviors, he became, in a word, neurotic. For a long time he resisted the idea of seeking any kind of professional – or even neighborly – advice on how to break a pattern of living that he knew would ruin his marriage and his relationship with his children. Eventually, though, he entered therapy.

Like most of us, and I think men are probably more like this than women, he just wanted to have someone give him the solution; he would then put that plan into practice and all would be well, quickly. The therapist’s words, however, were not comforting. It would take months, perhaps even years, to work through his unresolved issues. This is not good news for a programmer schooled in “outcome-based management” theory! The therapist told him that it was “like peeling the layers from an onion” and that his problems were like a barbed arrow that couldn’t be simply pulled out the way it entered the flesh, but had to go all the way through in order for healing to occur.” And so Tom began the long, sometimes tediously painful process of healing.

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Does any of that sound sort of familiar? We’ve all read similar stories in self-help books or even the Reader’s Digest with this kind of case history. If you were alive during the 1990’s you might have even bought some of these books yourself! “Making Peace with your Parents” was a biggie. So was “The Courage To Heal” and “The Power of Self Coaching” and so on. The books are all filled with case histories that end one of two ways: the troubled persons don’t follow through with therapy (for any number of reasons) and all is lost; OR, they follow through and live happily ever after.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There is a third scenario that appears once in a while: the “victim” (the oppressed person seeking help) is encouraged to be a wounded person, struggling till death, and seeking (and often receiving) sympathy all around. A living martyr. This “remain-a-victim” scenario is sinful and, let me assure you, anti-gospel!

But anyway, if the therapeutic healing process is successful, we in the religious world would call that a blessing. “Blessing” is a word we toss around pretty freely, and it is a word that is often being tossed around incorrectly (in my deeply held opinion) by modern Christians. “If God does what I want, God is blessing me” seems to be a prevalent way of expressing this idea. If God does what I want, God is blessing me.” I had a parent come to me one time while I was a headmaster in South Carolina who clearly was doing very well financially. Fancy cars, several homes, and money to burn. “We’re very blessed,” she told me.

So what is a blessing? The dictionary tells us that a blessing is a bestowing of holiness or divine will; or a way of showing or infusing approval. A glib person might think of a blessing as something like “God’s seal of good housekeeping”. Our English word from which we translate the Hebrew, by the way, originally meant to make things holy by a sacrifice, usually a blood sacrifice. The original Hebraic

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understanding was involved more with the favor of God or the hope of finding favor with God. In other words, when we say “God Bless You”, we’re really saying, “I pray that you find favor with God” or “may you find favor with God.” There’s a distinct hopefulness here.

Now you may have heard me say this before, but here’s the definition that I use for “blessing”: A blessing is anything that moves you closer to Union with your Creator. Hear that again: A blessing is anything that moves you closer to Union with your Creator.

I’ve had some mountaintop experiences in my life. You know what I mean: ecstatic moments, usually fleeting, where I know in the most profound and intimate way that God loves me and everything is working out to a perfection. As an aside, as a backpacker a lot of these mountaintop experiences actually occurred on a mountaintop! . . . but let that pass. These are valuable moments for me, although they are nearly impossible to “re-feel”, and any account I try to give of them falls miserably short of the mystical event.

On the other hand, I have a number a really bad “valley” experiences in my life too: Times when I was, like David, walking through the valley of the shadow of death. A feeling of being unloved, despairing, broken, hurt, hopeless. I can summon up feelings when I recollect those times. I can also give a pretty good account of them. And for me, the mountaintop experiences are times of assurance and hope. The valley experiences are times when I have something to learn. Isn’t that just awful? Isn’t that terrible news? But that’s the way it seems to be.

Here’s the interesting thing, though. When I do recollect those bad times, and I’m looking back from the other side, I realize that I was transformed from being a victim into a victor! We’ll come back to this.

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Today we heard the interesting story of Jacob wrestling with the angel . . . or depending upon which translation you read or where you read this account, wrestling with God or a man or a stranger. (we read from Genesis, but the account also occurs in Hosea). It’s an interesting story, but what can we make of it? Actually it’s a little odd, right? How did this dislocated hip story make it into Holy Scripture anyway?

Anyway, the quick recap is that the lyin’ cheatin’ untrustworthy, philandering, Jacob, who is so afraid that his loving brother might kill him on sight when they meet, that scoundrel who even sends his wives and children and servants ahead of him as he approaches his brother (were these human shields? Hmmmm), spends the night alone. He wrestles with God until daybreak. And then we have this strange dialog: "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

Jacob was having what some call a “dark night of the soul.” He was not having a mountaintop experience. Jacob’s onion was being peeled away layer by layer. The barbed arrow was working all the way through.

My wife Cindy is a trained Stephen Minister. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this program, but essentially it pairs up care-givers with care-receivers who are able to connect with each other by deep mutual understanding of shared trauma. I’m not a Stephen Minister, but I am nosey, and I’ve read of lot of Cindy’s resources. I am deeply impressed by an overarching principle of this ministry that asks, in the midst of pain, “where is God in this?”

In the midst of the trauma, where is the blessing? “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

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Can you call to mind right now a really tough time from your past? Not one you might be in now, but from your past: A death? Health issue? Broken relationship? Financial disaster? Can you reflect for just a moment on your valley experience? What was the outcome? Did you work all the way through it or bail out early. Did you emerge victorious or are you still a victim? Where was God in your crisis?

“I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

“A blessing is anything that moves you closer to Union with your Creator”

And then this from today’s Gospel lesson: 5,000 men (plus women and children) are fed with five loaves and two fishes. And food is left over. 12 baskets full. That just seems impossible.

Remember that really tough time from your past? Did that also seem insurmountable? When I have been in deepest despair, it also seems impossible that God would help me. My retrospect, however, shows me otherwise. It seems I need the mountaintop experiences for hope and what the old hymn calls “blessed assurance”; it seems I need the valley to learn. The question is, can I praise God in both circumstances? Unlike the mother in South Carolina, could I have lost my job, my car, and my family, and still say I’m truly blessed?

I am compelled to point out that Jacob, whom we call Israel from here on out, limps on his bad hip for the rest of his days. The recollection of his dark night is always there to remind him . . . but he is not a victim. He is victorious and becomes the father of nations. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to recount a valley experience than the ineffable joy of the mountaintop.

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The miracle of the loaves and fishes, like all miracles, ought to tell us something very important, very simple, and yet something we resist at a rational level. With God, nothing is impossible.

So I’m going to give you an assignment: As you go through your day today, and during the week, and maybe the month of August, in your joys and sorrows, and happy times and tribulations, ask yourself the Stephen minister question: “Where is God in this?”

Glory in the mountaintop experiences of a miraculous moment that seems impossible, like the loaves and fishes. Wrestle through the tough times like Jacob at Peniel, not abandoning the fight until you are blessed. Who knows, maybe it will become a habit.

We were never told that we would go through this life without pain and anguish, but we were told that we would not have to go through it alone. I have you. You have me. We both have a savior whose light we must never hide and who is with us always. Jesus, Beautiful Savior, glorious Lord. Emmanuel, God is with us, Blessed Redeemer, Living Word.

Where is God in all this? God is right here. And that’s really good news!

And now unto God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power, dominion, and Glory, both now and evermore. AMEN.