Featured Article

• Why Do We Educate?

  by Vincent Tompkins, Head of School, Saint Ann’s School In Nature’s Metropolis, his compelling history of Chicago and its relationship to the American West, William Cronon tells the story of Chicago’s rise to a position of dominance of the grain trade of the Midwest in the latter half of the 19th century. One of the fundamental changes that Cronon describes is the transition in the market for wheat from a trading system based on individual sacks of grain that remained intact from the farmer’s field to the grist mill, to an automated system of grain elevators in which wheat was sorted, graded, stripped of its individual characteristics and readied for sale through an increasingly impersonal and distant system. In the older method, nothing adulterated the individual sack of grain’s “characteristic weight, bulk, cleanliness, purity, and flavor that marked it as the product of a particular tract of land and a particular farmer’s labor." In the new system, the focus was on the smooth and efficient transport of a predictable, tradable commodity to market, in larger and larger quantities, but with any remnants of its particular origins and characteristics entirely erased. I begin with this reference because something similar, though perhaps not so extreme, has occurred in the way we think about education in the United States. Download the full article here

• Time is Not on Our Side

  by Steve Nelson, Head of School, The Calhoun School “Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is,” sang Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in 1964. Ah, if only. Those of us accelerating through middle age toward the inevitable end know quite well that time is not on our side. My late friend the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., whose work for civil rights, peace and a nuclear-free world spanned many decades, frequently described himself as “a man in a hurry” during his last years. He had a lot to do and time was not on his side.
  Time is not our friend. Download the full article here