In 1975, when I was a senior at the College of Wooster, we had to complete an Independent Study. This is a serious endeavor, almost a right of passage, with the attendant nervousness, fear, sense of hopelessness, fatigue, desperation, possibility, wonder, zillion note cards, manual typewriter, paranoia of losing your only copy, meetings with your advisor, start agains, accomplishment, brilliant expressions that come from who-knows-where, sinking feelings, encouragement from similarly tortured souls, massive adrenaline associated with the last 24 hours, re-reading pages so many times that you couldn't catch a typo if it flew into your eye, and, finally, the dawning realization that you have done it. For the rest of your life, you can look back at the experience with gratitude, delight and a touch of pride. I was a history major, and I was particularly interested in social justice and equality. My first idea was to write about how soldiers are motivated to do things that they would never do in civil society. I started the research and discovered that someone had already written that book ("Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle" by J. Glenn Gray). So I picked another topic: "Dissent and Experimentation in American Schools; 1900-1960". The only problem was that 1960 was only 15 years ago, and some in the History Department didn't think this was really history. I pushed back, and they relented. Actually, I can see their point a lot better now, for some reason. But it was still a good project, and I loved many of the books that I read and still think about the passion, determination and optimism that drove school innovators. Five years later, I was in business school and then Wall Street. It took 35 years for me to return to where I began. A small interruption in the grand scheme of things, but it feels good to be back.
Sandy Spring Friends School is no ordinary place. We have something special going on here. The current generation did not invent it; we have merely inherited it. But it is in our care, and we have but one responsibility: we must believe that what we are doing will make a difference. That we are doing important work.
Historians will not look back at this time and declare it to be a golden era as far as education in this country is concerned. One day, perhaps, America will obsess about its schools, place great value on teaching (and those that teach), honor science over ideology, fight to ensure innovation and experimentation in education, insist on a well informed, compassionate and engaged citizenry. And when that day comes, the opportunity we have in front of us will be less interesting, less vital. Everyone will be doing it. The book will have been written. We'll have to find another topic. But things are a little shaky out there; just ask the public school teachers in Wisconsin. And therein lies the opportunity. We, together, can decide what it is that is important for our kids to know. We, together, can instill a love of learning. We, together, can cultivate their impulse to serve. We, together, can inspire a sense of astonishment of the beauty of the earth and the heavens, the simplicity of happiness, the elegance of time, the relentlessness of biology, the universality of literature. What can be more important than that?