The Headmaster's Blog

The Real World

15 February 2012

I recently happened upon a letter written by Vice-Chancellor John McCardell of Sewanee, my alma mater, that made an impression upon me.  The letter compared educational institutions to the real world.  This is a comparison that I have often considered.

The letter impressed me because it reminded me of the statement of educational philosophy that I submitted to Canterbury’s search committee when I was a candidate for Head of School.  In this statement, I made the point of asserting that schools, and especially those that educate young students, are not the real world because children are not ready for the real world.  Rather, schools should seek to create an educational environment that will prepare children for the world that they will face as adults.  The world of preparation and the world of reality are far different, and intentionally so.

But Dr. McCardell puts a different twist on this comparison.  In his view, schools are not the real world because they should aspire to something greater.  He writes, “[O]ur very reason for being has everything to do with raising society’s sights, its behavior, its aspirations to something higher and nobler than what we call the real world[.]”  Dr. McCardell is on to something here.

Our goal as schools, and specifically as Canterbury School, should transcend the mere objective of preparing students for life as adults.  More significantly, our purpose should be to prepare our students to take what they have learned here and make the world a better place.

Therefore, at the core of our purpose rests the ambition of social transformation.  If we achieve our goal, the vehicles for that transformation will be the students of Canterbury School.  In the opinion of Dr. McCardell, the cause has never been more urgent, and the case never more compelling.

16 January 2012

As I often do this time of year, I have been thinking about our holiday today.  It is an important one for our school, and we will be spending time in the coming weeks to reinforce this with our students.  Parents can help with this process.  Printed below is a letter that I sent to our parents a number of years ago, and I offer it now in the hope that it will spur you to talk to your children about Reverend King and the critical position he occupies in our country’s history.

15 January 2009

Dear Canterbury Parents:

As we stand on the cusp of an extended weekend, I thought I might offer a gentle reminder about the reasons why we will be out of school on Monday.  Canterbury will be closed to honor the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I always try to do two things over the course of this weekend.  First, I watch the recording of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which is considered one of the finest demonstrations of American oratory of the 20^th century.  I also reread Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which he penned that same year. That letter, perhaps more than anything else Dr. King said or wrote, suggests the moral code that governed his actions.

You may remember the historical context that generated the letter.  Dr. King traveled to Birmingham, where he organized nonviolent protests against the racial segregation and discrimination that plagued the city.  Though a judge issued an order prohibiting the protests, Dr. King ignored the order and was jailed as a result.  While in jail, he received a letter from eight clergymen who asked him to abandon the demonstrations.  Dr. King’s response, in the form of this letter, now stands as one of the most influential documents of modern American history.

Dr. King’s letter connects general notions of justice and injustice with their spiritual foundation.  He writes, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.  An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”  Dr. King goes on to advocate for obeying just laws and disobeying unjust laws.  “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”  It is the conviction that his actions carried both a moral and theological imperative that, no doubt, gave Dr. King the strength needed to persevere in the face of such inequitable and appalling treatment.

It is easy to lose sight of the sacrifices made by those who have worked to make our country a better place.  Amidst all that occupies our time and thoughts each day- our jobs, our children, the economy- we tend to live in the here and now unless we reserve time for reflection.  Thus, we should take time to remember their accomplishments, and we reserve Monday for Dr. King.  Seize the opportunity that Monday presents.  I encourage you to help your children understand Monday’s significance.  Read his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” watch the video of his miraculous “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, and talk to your children about the perils of intolerance and injustice.

I will leave you with the final sentence from Dr. King’s letter.  “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away, that the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and that in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.”  Talking to your children about Dr. King will ensure, at least in part, that the “deep fog of misunderstanding” against which he fought so ardently will dissipate forever.

Have a great weekend.

Very truly yours,

Burns Jones

Head of School

I heard someone recently comment upon an important distinction between families and communities in this way. While we are born into our family, we choose our community.

This is certainly an appropriate point of comparison when it comes to Canterbury. We have all made the conscious decision to join this school community. It is my belief that our community is made stronger through the individual gifts that each member brings, and the collective strength of our community- built upon the individual strengths of our members- is evident when we are all together.

I realize with ever increasing regularity just how precious our time as a community really is. Invariably, as our children grow older, our ability to spend time with them wanes. Homework, sports, cars, and dating all begin to conspire against us. It is important, then, that we take advantage of the opportunities that we have. Our Friday chapel services offer such an opportunity.

Tradition dictates that many of our parents attend these services, and the number of parents in attendance on any given Friday demonstrates the value of these services. There are few occasions in life when we have the opportunity, in the company of our children, to pause, to reflect, to laugh, and to pray. The opportunity for our community to assemble within a building designed to inspire awe and among others whom we love and admire is an honor that we all should take advantage of.

If you haven’t yet attended a Friday service, I encourage you to make the time. It is guaranteed to warm your heart.

I hope to see you in chapel soon.

Very truly,
Burns Jones
Head of School

12 September 2011
Dear Canterbury Community:
Over the last few years, the Canterbury staff has spent a great deal of energy talking and writing about the interesting changes taking place in education. As you might expect, these changes are driven by technological expansion, globalization, and the evolution of skills expected of 21st century professionals. The result is that the educational model in which most of us were educated is no longer an efficient vehicle for educating our students for the modern world. Schools must adapt in order to prepare their students.
In this same vein, I happened upon a TED address given by Ken Robinson back in 2006 that speaks to this issue, and specifically, the need for schools to cultivate creativity in order for students to be successful in the future. You may know that TED, which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” is a non-profit that was established to share the thoughts and feelings of the world’s foremost thinkers and doers. TED invites these speakers to conferences held throughout the year and asks them to share their most creative ideas in eighteen minutes or less. These talks are collected on their website (www.ted.com).
Ken Robinson is an author, speaker, and advisor on educational issues, and I believe he presents some of the more provocative views on the current state of education. The links to two of his presentations are attached below. Both are short, and I hope you will take a few minutes to review them. I look forward to hearing your responses.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Sincerely,

Burns Jones Head of School

8 August 2011

Dear Canterbury Parents:
I am writing to you at the time when activity on our campus has reached its annual nadir. Our summer programs have ended, the staff has not yet returned for in-service, many of our administrators are taking one last vacation, and the grass is too dry to cut. The campus is remarkably quiet. This is the time when our school is least like our school.
That will change soon, when the sounds typically associated with campus life- the slamming of car doors, the shouts of greeting, the thump of a soccer ball well kicked, the patter of feet on the chapel floor- will return. In doing so, these sounds will restore our school to its appropriate state of affairs. It seems to me that there is a direct relationship between the amount of noise on a school’s campus and the amount of education that takes place. Schools should be noisy places.
My experience demonstrates that beginning around the second week of August, the noise level at Canterbury begins to increase. In fact, there has been steady stream of parents and students into the office over the course of the last week. I expect that this phenomenon will only intensify this week. My experience also demonstrates that the desire of our students to return to Canterbury begins to intensify around this time. This reality conflicts with my own experience as a child. Whereas I couldn’t endure the prospect of another school year and would go to Promethean efforts to prolong summer vacation and avoid the start of another year, Canterbury students are eager to return.
This promises to be an exciting year. We have developed big plans for Canterbury’s future that we will begin to unveil this fall. These plans promise to generate a great deal of excitement within the community and to position our school for the future. Thus, for these reasons, I am particularly excited about the upcoming school year.
Very soon now, you will be dropping your children off at Canterbury for the new school year. All of us here look forward to their arrival, and the opening day of school may sound like a commotion to some, to us it is the “joyful noise” that reminds us of why we are here.

Very truly yours,

Burns Jones
Head of School

Ethics in the Digital Age

March 2011

Let me begin with a confession; my family is probably one of only a few families in Greensboro that does not have cable television.  In fact, when television transmissions switched from analog to digital about a year ago, I had to go to Sears to buy a converter box.  According to the salesman, I was the only person to purchase this device, and he had to suppress his laughter as he completed my $45 purchase.

Up to that point we had relied on rabbit ears for reception.  (For those who might not know or remember, rabbit ears are the dual antenna that you probably last observed perched precariously atop your grandparent’s television.)  Thus, while I am an advocate for technological innovation, I must confess that I often feel impossibly behind the times.

This feeling reaches its apogee when I see how adept our students are in their use of technology.  Their aptitude reinforces the somewhat overwhelming feeling that no matter how feverishly I work, I will never be able to catch up.

I suspect that I am not the only adult who feels this way. While I don’t mean to impugn the technological sophistication of all adults- we have, after all, developed the high art of texting while driving- I know, too, that our level of sophistication falls impossibly behind that of our children.  (If you feel differently, take a look at the video on YouTube of the two-year old manipulating an iPad for the first time.  It is absolutely astonishing.)  The label of “technological immigrant” holds true for most of us who were born in an age of Atari, the Commodore 64, and rotary phones.  The internet is something that was created during our lifetime; our children have never known a world without it.

This disparity can leave us perpetually frustrated, especially when it comes to monitoring our children’s use of technology.  Data indicate that most of our children have Facebook pages and that most parents have never viewed their child’s page.  Perhaps this ignorance is a result of our inability to manipulate the technology.  Perhaps it is an act of self-preservation; we avoid oversight because we are worried about what we will discover.

Lest we run the risk of feeling that all is lost and that technology is rendering obsolete our influence as parents, I encountered some words of wisdom recently that should give us hope.  This past winter, I had the chance to hear the Rev. Daniel Heischman, the President of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, speak at a conference for Episcopal school educators.  One of the things that Rev. Heischman acknowledged was the helplessness that adults often feel when trying to set boundaries within a technology realm that we often do not understand.

Rev. Heischman went on, however, to argue that we are not without influence because the values that adults have are more applicable now than they have ever been and that these values should operate as thoroughly within the technological realm as they do outside this realm.  I might take this one step further to argue that if we fail to impose values within this realm then we also fail in our responsibility to our children.

For this reason, we are developing a new technology class that all of our middle school students will take next year that will not only teach the skills that they need to navigate our emerging curriculum and to function as productive high school students, but also the values that we expect as parents and as a school.  While this step will not guarantee that technological usage will be devoid of any missteps, it will reinforce that the values we hope all of our students will possess do not vanish while they are online.

Rev. Heischman concluded his remarks by commenting that there is no better place than Episcopal schools for us to teach values.  I believe this fully.  In the face of our school’s progress with Smart Boards, desktops, laptops, iPods, iPads, GPS, and the myriad of other devices that our students now use on campus, it is reassuring to remember that adults still have a voice.   We are fortunate to offer an education that reinforces the values that are so fundamental to the growth of complete children and to the development of an ethical world.

Continue reading →