In one of my other lives I do a great deal of work predicated on the idea that schools want to be intentional in expressing their missions and values in their programs, policies, and practices. Since my entire life (literally) has been spent in the independent school world, these schools tend to be my audience, and I am keenly aware that their statements of mission and values are regarded as fundamental to their very existence. Proof? The regulatory bodies the independent school community has created to certify schools’ accreditation use these statements as the basis of the self-study and external review process by which accreditation is granted.
Thus, mission matters, as I and dozens of my peers have been saying and writing for decades.
I am inclined by nature and experience to take a high-minded view of such things. A school’s stated ideals ought to be considered as articulating a covenant between the institution of the school and the members of its community—most of all students and their families: “We the school promise to provide programs and circumstances in which the ideals expressed in our statements of mission and values will be fulfilled in the experience of your child and family.” I’ve been accused of crazy romanticism and even hypocrisy for believing this, but I do believe it, deep in my heart and soul.
The hypocrisy idea, however, is persistent. The argument that supports it is simple: These independent schools are selective and expensive places frequented by families and supported by graduates and others not for their worthy values but rather for their success in giving children a leg up, often an elitist leg up, with regard to material aspirations, in particular college and next-school admission and the making of advantageous social connections. Their statements of mission and values are nothing but window dressing intended to attract paying customers, and their professions and even expressions of inclusivity and equity are offered only to assuage discomfort related to and even mask the exclusivity on which their being has been built.
This argument cannot be answered, because to even attempt to do so invites a chorus of scoffing and scorn from all who would advance it. Also because for too many people in the independent school community of families, graduates, and supporters, it has an irrefutable ring of truth.
Alas, the language of many mission statements raises some red flags. The word “leaders” pops up often, and it’s just too easy to project an equivalency in many people’s minds between the idea of “leader” and the traditional hierarchies “led” by presidents, chairpersons, captains, and bosses—even as many educators in any given school may be working to redefine the word in terms of social and civic engagement and advocacy. Here the branding message may be twofold: your kind of leader or my kind of leader, but all annealed in a pricey, exclusive oven that will help your child achieve a distinction you can advertise on the back window of your SUV. Similarly cynical but also—admit it—realistic arguments can be made about words like “productive” and “successful.”
And then the demographic critique is too easy to make, but what else would one expect from a high-priced business whose foundations almost always lie in past expectations of special opportunity for the children of the “haves”? But at least let us commend the efforts of schools and their communities to include and embrace multiple diversities—the more so as schools belatedly recognize that what they are doing is too little, too late.
I know and believe this: that the vast bulk of the educators and leaders in independent schools are people of good will and good intentions, working (if you will) to transform cruise ships into ferry boats—that is, from effete luxury goods into reliable and even essential working vessels of change that can and will truly take students to better places to lead lives—and here I dredge up some of the most venerable language of the genre—of usefulness and purpose.
A graduate school English professor once told me, “Don’t underestimate clichés when you find them. When you encounter a cliché, dig THERE!”
“Usefulness and purpose” is a cliché where I’ve been digging all of my professional life, and independent school educators’ understanding of the idea of purpose has been enhanced in recent years by the work of thinkers like Howard Gardner and William Damon. On a précis of this thinking I have based my own: that learning, formal and informal, should be both an end in itself and a doorway to the discovery of purpose, rewarded by a profound understanding and a generous appreciation of the self and the world. While learning may have certain instrumental value, such value is subordinate to intellectual, cultural, and personal engagement and to meaningful living. (Yes, those words are taken directly from the old Independent Curriculum Group’s Principles. I crafted ’em, and I stand by ’em.)
That’s our shared mission, my independent school colleagues. And it is up to us, in this moment as critics call down hellfire on our too-often self-satisfied and sometimes ethically suspect and over-resourced institutions, to call to account our institutions and those who govern and speak for them. And we must recognize and call ourselves to account when and where we have permitted the instrumental aims of independent school education to outweigh our human obligation to help our students, our peers, and ourselves toward intellectual, cultural, and personal engagement and meaningful living.
Independent schools have many freedoms, and I believe that these should be regarded as imperatives to serve their society (whose members all pay for them, if you stop to think about gift deductions and property tax exemptions—tax revenue that government foregoes in these special instances but which must then be made up by the rest of us). These freedoms and the awareness of burdens pushed off onto society at large require independent schools not to become solipsistic caricatures of the world of inconsiderate privilege but to become, as I have written before, intentional laboratories of new and better educational—in the broadest sense—ideas.
Their freedoms also, I believe, OBLIGATE independent schools to be models of equity and justice, showing the world new pathways as meaningfully, sincerely, and profoundly expressed cultures of purposeful learning and truly useful living. Independent schools and those who lead and serve them must, must, must live up to the loftiest language of their individual statements of mission and values, interpreted in the most idealistic, morally generous, and ethically ambitious ways.