Archive for the NotYourFathersSchool Category

As the economy stalls and some schools look at empty desks, there is quite a lot of talk about the “value proposition” of independent schools. This is simply the bottom line in the calculation based on the question: Is sending my kid to this independent school worth […]

The 1932 Marx Brothers farce Horse Feathers opens with a presidential installation involving the gown-clad faculty and the more casually attired student body of Huxley College (whose rival, incidentally, is Darwin). The new president is inexplicably Groucho, holding nothing back just because his character wears a doctoral […]

For some of us it’s an itch, for others a royal pain, and for others a non-issue: Should we be talking about “21st-century skills” when we’re already a tenth of the way into the century? As we talk about the future of education, doesn’t using the term […]

Opening day chapel, and the distinguished-looking man at the pulpit wasn’t the Headmaster, and he wasn’t anyone else known to ninth-grade me. Tanned, with silver hair and a dark suit, he had to be important. “Your parents are spending nine dollars a day on your education here. […]

Educators are feeling about like everyone else after the economic paroxysms of the past week. Five weeks after the annual fund has been put to bed (and the ones I know about seem to have come through okay) and just a couple of weeks before the curtain […]

I’ve offered up a pep talk to new teachers, but the experience of each new hire is as much a responsibility of the school as it is of the teacher. Assuming that the school handled its recruiting and hiring process well, the odds are already well in […]

In a very few weeks school will be starting, and you will be starting a wonderful new career. You are probably excited, and probably scared. A dozen large questions loom in your consciousness, trading places with one another in the Anxiety Gavotte that troubles the dreams (and […]

For those of you who are not members of the ISED-L listserv for independent school folks (mostly), this morning the estimable Fred Bartels set forth a pretty convincing case as to why independent schools and their faculties could and even should become the go-to source for digital […]

It’s the hot news story of the week, that quite a few of the reformers out to fix public education have themselves been educated in independent schools: “In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education.” At least the political–or is it ideological?–spectrum is covered. From Obama […]

…but it’s not that I haven’t been thinking about schools and how they could be. A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to present at a large and well-known boarding school, an experience that was delightful and fascinating and that made me ponder the role of […]