Head of School’s Notebook | Hope

December 21, 2016

Each time I meet with families who are visiting Cate, I encourage them to savor what I believe to be the most fundamental quality of our School: unbounded hope.  I think all schools are overflowing with it, frankly.  It is part of the fabric of places where young people go to discover who they are, become who they want to be, imagine all they might do.

The students bring it with them, but it’s there on campus too, in the motivations of faculty, the commitment and drive of coaches, the care of advisors, the diligence of staff.  We are all there for a reason.  Actually, we’re there for lots of reasons, but we all have a foundational objective – a mission – in common:  to contribute in some way through each rising generation to a world that is better, improved, growing in purpose or compassion, understanding or productivity.

I have always thought education is for that very thing – for learning what it means to be a contributing citizen, to carry responsibility thoughtfully, to take what was or has been and help it become what will be.  Schools help people do that; or more particularly, the teachers and students within them do.

So what do we do in schools – or outside of them – when for one reason or another hopes are dashed?  When we can’t agree on the paradigm we are building, when the world or even the smaller communities within it are fractured, contentious, seemingly beyond repair?  What do we do when fear impinges on hope?

My guess is that a good many people in schools asked themselves that question recently, for a host of reasons.  We are living through the aftermath of an election that polarized our country or at least drew attention to a polarization that has been there but was left unacknowledged, simmering, for too long.  Our world is changing as fast or faster than at any other time in human history.  Social mores are evolving, the information age is exploding, the world is getting strangely smaller and simultaneously more unmanageable. With social media we now know (or think we know) too much, but there is less truth – certainly less truth that we can agree on.  Then again, we can’t seem to agree on much of anything.  It’s a recipe for despair potentially.  But then, it’s also not.

The cool thing about schools is that they rely on challenging situations – on history and disagreement, on the repercussions of good decisions and bad ones, on the power of language and the importance of familiarity, on the certainty of change and the practices that create or reveal new possibilities.  Especially in times of distress or conflict, schools are the crucibles that show us how to manage or understand what is so that we might inform and build whatever comes next.  Schools are places where disagreement is actually productive, where we use it to inspire collaboration and propel learning.

Ironically, these are also the same institutions who have struggled most profoundly with the political squabbling so conspicuous this year, with the results of the presidential election, with the tenets of free speech and their application in a newly activated cultural context.  But those failings, too, are not only instructive; they’re beneficial.  Schools are the epicenter for examined lives, and they have the capability of turning the intellectual lens both inward and outward.  That really is the source of the culture of hope – the belief that there are answers.  We just need to be willing to look for them.

And so we will.  Resilience and hope go hand in hand, and one of the things we can all agree on is that there is work to do.  That is the first of many shared truths.  Perhaps we can help to reveal a great many more – in the words of our founder Curtis Cate – “along the road to a good education.”