A LETTER FROM VINCE
Boats Against the Current Summer 2015
Fifty years ago, preparations were underway to enroll the first group of sixty or so students at St. Ann’s That is as true now as it was then, for certain fundamental practices and beliefs remain at our core: Episcopal School. Nothing was certain, other than the determination of Canon Harcourt, the Vestry of St. Ann’s Church, and the newly hired headmaster, Stanley Bosworth, to embark on an educational • We continue to believe that children are creators rather than empty vessels. venture in Brooklyn Heights that had many precedents but no direct forebear, and no detailed • We continue to assemble within our walls a community of teachers that is stunning in artistic blueprint for what the school would become. And so it began. vision, in scholarly accomplishment, in commitment to our mission, and in their deep and profound love of children. When many of the students, parents and teachers who participated in the first five years of the school • We continue to admit students of many creeds and colors who are joyful, unpredictable, gathered in our theater last October to reflect on those early days, we were all reminded of the leap of curious, and iconoclastic; who are breathtakingly gifted as poets, actors, painters, writers, and faith that was required to be a part of this uncertain enterprise. But it was also clear how desperately mathematicians; who without grades, rewards, or prizes achieve fluency in languages, subtleties of those first parents were to find for their children a school that would liberate children from stale literary criticism, and nuances of musical interpretation well beyond their years. routines and stultifying dogmas and complacent mediocrity. All of this Saint Ann’s promised to do. • We continue to believe that meaningful education involves risks both intellectual and emotional, and that our curriculum—more audacious and eclectic than any other I know—is at its best a This young school was not, as Stanley wrote to teachers in 1970, a “prim paradigm of educational playground for the mind and the soul. innovation.” Rather, it was “at its best a hectic organic cell from which life achievement may be • We continue to occupy every square inch of our buildings, with music spilling out of locker converted to creation.” More and more families flocked to join, enrollment grew by leaps and rooms, audiences packing the red stairs for concerts, children tumbling over one another—all of bounds, new teachers—just out of college or refugees from other schools—signed on to direct plays us, children and teachers, living out John Dewey’s creed that “education is not preparation for life. or chamber groups, teach English and math, run field trips and man study halls. Every action and Education is life.” decision was based on the premise that given the freedom to pursue knowledge, acquire skills, to seek transcendence in the arts and academics, children would blossom, driven not by competitive urges but And what of the future? Yes there are still barbarians at the gate, as Stanley’s letters home to parents by their innate curiosity. each August almost always warned. But the vibrancy of our school, our constancy in pursuit of our mission, the strength of support we receive from parents and graduates, all suggest to me the And what of the Saint Ann’s of today? We have changed, certainly, as the times have changed, our possibility of a future that is as interesting and compelling as our past. We, perhaps more than other neighborhood and city have changed. A school with nearly 1,100 students and more than three schools, are haunted by the idea that there was a particular moment in the past when Saint Ann’s hundred teachers and staff is inevitably different than a school of sixty, or five hundred. Stanley wrote became Eden, when it achieved an almost mystical equipoise between order and chaos, freedom and in these pages in 1982 that Saint Ann’s was indeed “more conservative than once we were,” but that community, old and new, stasis and change. This trope appears every few years in graduation speeches, the school “remains and intends to remain a thorn in the side of traditionalists. We are here to respond as lament or Jeremiad, in which it is declared that this is the last “true” Saint Ann’s class. As we reflect to children. We are here to poke fun at the fusty anachronisms of convention.” in the coming year on fifty years of history I suspect that we will find that moment to be as elusive and alluring as the green light on Daisy’s dock.
Vince Tompkins Head of School
Elliot, 12th grade
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Fitting In Winter 2015-16
One of the rituals of autumn at Saint Ann’s is the parade of almost daily admissions tours. Tours for the Lower School typically begin in a room above the Kindergarten on Henry Street. There, backed by several portraits of dour Presbyterian divines on the wall behind me (predecessors of our current landlords), I endeavor or so to give the parents of prospective students some sense of what we are about, what sets us apart, what to expect and what not to expect if they choose us and we choose their child. A similar ritual unfolds for parents and applicants for admission to ninth grade, only the tours meet in whatever space we can find in the Bosworth Building before proceeding to take in a handful of high school classes.
On one high school tour this fall a parent’s hand went up in the middle of my opening remarks. For five or ten minutes I had been describing a school in which the arts occupy a central place, in which students are expected to exercise agency, take risks, make mistakes, discover themselves through literature, music, languages, to unlock passions in mathematics or science or poetry, to experience achievement and play as mutually reinforcing activities. I talked about learning for its own sake, and about our deep-seated commitment to teaching without the use of formal grades. My eager interlocutor seemed desperate to know how children whose formative years were spent in such a place were supposed to “fit in” to the world after graduation.
“I hope they don’t,” I said. Plenty of schools seem to fill that function, turning out graduates without the will, inclination or knowledge to question, to meet the world skeptically, to live in perpetual tension with it. The world does not need more of that, I said, it needs people who will seek to change it, to make it better or subvert the status quo whether by making art, or seeking social change, or simply by going about whatever profession they choose with the belief that they should not only think outside the box but refuse to accept that the box has any real legitimacy to begin with.
This question struck me with such force because it came in the context of another dismal season of political and social insanity: mass killings in Paris and Mali, the continuing epidemic of gun violence in this country (in Oregon, Colorado, California, and too many other places), the vicious demonization of refugees and immigrants among presidential aspirants, racial violence at the hands of
the police. It seems to me perverse to ask that we or any school help students to “fit in” to the world as Third grade students study the work of Muybridge and Edgerton. it exists now, rather than to equip them to challenge its assumptions and its orthodoxies in the most profound ways possible. Even as we seek to give to each generation of students the gift of knowing what we regard as great, beautiful, transcendent, and worthy, we also strive (as Grace Dunham ’10 so eloquently described at our 50th anniversary celebration last October) to help students find their voice, that they may use it here and in the world.
Vince Tompkins Head of School
2 3 A LETTER FROM VINCE
The Open Road Summer 2016
What We Live For Third, and perhaps most important, we sustain an atmosphere of independence that is, at the least, (Lyrics from the closing song of the Preschool Opera 2016) unusual. We seek never to underestimate what children are capable of, and encourage them to challenge themselves constantly, to push through momentary bouts of fear or anxiety—whether they This is what I live for are anxieties born of the creative process or related to the more everyday challenges of making one’s Baby, you’re my open road way in the world. I do worry that the culture around us seems more and more to embrace a vision You can take me anywhere the wind blows of childhood (and thus parenting) that emphasizes comfort, safety, and constant reassurance at the Right into the great unknown cost of helping children to develop the capacity to think for themselves, to confront the unknown We can throw our hands up out the window and the unfamiliar, to navigate intellectual and social challenges on their own, to take risks and make This is what we live for mistakes. Bubble-wrap is a fine thing for shipping delicate objects, but it has no place in the raising of –by American Authors adventurous and confident children.
In June, with graduation behind us and the prospect of summer ahead, a teacher stopped by my The metaphorical scraping of the knee ought always to have its place somewhere close to the center office, and we reflected on the 50th anniversary year we’d just finished. He commented to me that of childhood. We have embraced this impulse in numerous ways, most of all by sustaining a powerful one measure of the vitality and success of what we are doing was the extraordinary eloquence and dynamic in which the unleashing of each teacher’s creative impulses and intellectual and artistic thoughtfulness of each of the six senior speakers from the Class of 2016 at graduation the week before. passions reinforces the potential for students to discover in themselves capacities that they did not In my estimation he wasn’t wrong when he suggested that if one had replaced the six students chosen know existed. Our classrooms are many things, but they are certainly, as Linda Kaufman wrote in our by their peers with some other half-dozen from the grade, the perspectives and themes would have Unofficial History, “a protected place, a place to learn about the past and discover the present, a place changed but the courage, candor, and intelligence of their remarks would in all likelihood have met that provides our children and grandchildren with the vision to confront the unknown…the future we the same mark. cannot imagine.” As we embark on our second half-century at Saint Ann’s, on a future we can imagine even if we cannot know its contours, this aspiration on behalf of our children remains at our core. This simple assertion tells us something important about a school that has no valedictorian, no grades, no lessons in elocution, no role for adults in the choice of graduation speakers. What is so powerfully evident at each year’s graduation is our students’ self-confidence, their ability to articulate complex Vince Tompkins ideas, to give voice to aspirations and frustrations, to converse easily with one another and with adults, Head of School to speak not only for themselves but for a broader collective experience.
How is it that Saint Ann’s nurtures these particular qualities? First, through our enthusiastic embrace of curiosity and exploration. You will not find a classroom at Saint Ann’s—from preschool to high school—where these traits are not nurtured and encouraged. Our teachers create structures to the day and to their curricula that guide without constricting, that embrace playfulness without sacrificing a sense of purpose or accomplishment, whether in the form of a proof, a play, or a text that students and teachers master together.
Second, we hold to a particular vision of children that prohibits the kind of condescension that can too often creep into teacher-student relationships elsewhere. An atmosphere of mutual respect, of open-mindedness towards new ideas whether they come from students or the teacher is pervasive in our school. When children know constantly and unfailingly that they are valued for their insights and their potential, that they are loved unconditionally even when they are challenged to do better, their confidence and sense of agency grows.
Artwork by Ayla, 7th Grade
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The Intentional Community Winter 2017
I grew up in a large, peripatetic family whose roots were on the southwestern fringes of Philadelphia. This is not a new aspiration for our school. In its early years Saint Ann’s explicitly embraced the idea When I was about to start kindergarten my father quit his job, my parents sold everything they that its multitudes of gifted students should be racially and ethnically diverse. In one of the school’s owned, borrowed money from relatives and friends, and bought a tiny marina on marshland outside earliest fundraising campaigns Stanley Bosworth placed diversity at the center of our mission: “St. of Cape May, New Jersey. Four years later we moved back to Pennsylvania, two years after that, back Ann’s Episcopal School opened seven years ago with two overriding commitments: to develop an to Cape May. I moved in with relatives so that I could attend a high school in Delaware, and after that outstanding education for children with outstanding potential and to maintain a diversified student my wanderings were all my own. body reflecting the heterogeneity of the New York City community.”
From first to twelfth grade my education was in Catholic schools where most of the families came In the past five years our teachers, students, and administrators have taken up the task of joining from a narrow demographic of tradespeople, civil servants, teachers, small-business owners, the our abiding commitment to the limitless potential of each individual student with a more open occasional doctor or lawyer or nurse. In elementary school I thought that hanging out at my friend recognition that race, gender, gender identity, class, and other aspects of identity play a role in how Carl’s—whose family had built and operated a three-story beachfront motel with a pool and a we move through the world. In weaving the tapestry of a gifted student body—composed of those we restaurant—was the absolute apex of luxury. Ethnically, my schools reflected the composition of recognize not simply as students but as budding cellists and poets, historians and scientists, Classicists suburban and small-town Catholic communities in the second half of the twentieth century—mostly and coders—we have sought more deliberately to embrace the variety of experiences and perspectives Irish, German, Polish, Italian, English. Non-white students were barely a presence, so the racial that the children of the city around us can bring to our symposium. And we have sought to confront tensions and bigotry of the 1960s and ’70s more often played out on stages outside of school, in the impediments that prevented full and equal participation in that symposium from being a reality patterns of residential segregation and employment that I only clearly discerned later. I will never for every one of our students. In seeking new faculty we have seen how the freedom that we afford forget those teachers who within this context gave me a sense of how Caravaggio, Dylan Thomas, or teachers to shape their curricula—Adiche in one classroom, Twain in the next—can be magnified by a Richard Wright could alter how I saw the world around me. wider range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives among the artists and scholars we recruit.
College was a revelation. The circumscribed boundaries of my adolescent world shattered. Intellectual Intentionally embracing difference is sometimes hard. It is—in this historical moment at least—a horizons that I’d barely glimpsed were now open to me. Long-cherished beliefs were suddenly called countercultural move, a deliberate effort to show that the sinews of commitment that bind us one to into question. Some of my classmates were, like me, first-generation college students, there with the another can hold against the tensions and misunderstandings that difference can sometimes bring. help of scholarships, student loans, and work-study jobs. Others were members of a cosmopolitan But the struggle is unquestionably necessary if we truly wish to celebrate our shared humanity. If American establishment—from New York, Washington, Boston, California. What happened in the we succeed in making ourselves fully visible to one another, vulnerable to one another, open to one classroom was formative and life-altering, but just as important was the experience of being part of another, then this school will have acted on its deepest principles to enrich the education of every child a community that was ideologically, racially, geographically, and socio-economically diverse beyond in its care and to make education a celebration of life itself. anything I’d experienced before. College was my first experience of committing myself to the life of the mind and finding that I had ample company. It made all that my parents sacrificed to send me there seem worthwhile. It changed who I am and set me on a path to making education my life’s Vince Tompkins work, and it helped me to see that access to an educational environment like this could be a means to Head of School understand and overcome the structural inequities of American society.
I’ve come to realize more fully in the past year or two that the personal importance I attach to diversity and inclusion at Saint Ann’s has something to do with dreams too long deferred in my own education. When I look at Saint Ann’s through this lens I see an intentional community of teachers and students, united by a passion for ideas and art, drawn from and reflecting a city of many peoples, ready to learn with and from one another in our “fierce pursuit of knowledge, skill and artistry.” In the polarized and fearful era on which our nation appears to have embarked, this vision of Saint Ann’s seems all the more imperative.
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Unfinished Business Summer 2017 Like our students, Saint Ann’s is unfinished. That phrase took on a literal meaning this year as construction in the Bosworth Building and across the street disrupted everyone’s patterns and routines. But we are also, more fundamentally, unfinished in knowing who we are and what we will become. Each year our classes come to an end with projects, performances, exams, or a final conversation. We At our final faculty meeting of the year, members of the Music Department performed a movement write our reports. We send graduates into the world. We return in the fall to begin again what can from Mozart’s first symphony, which he composed when he was just eight years old. Symphony No. appear to be simply a virtuous circle. But this cycle masks the fact that we are constantly evolving. 1 is at once stunning in what it reveals about the precocious talent of its young composer, and a mere We are deeply rooted in and guided by our history and our shared ideals, but we face anew each year glimpse of the more complex compositions his career would bring. the task of deciding what it is we want to be, how we want to meet the world and how we want to equip our students to understand it. We do not seek, in either our past or our future, some perfect This meeting came the day after graduation for the Class of 2017. As in prior years, the speakers version of ourselves. Such a thing does not exist. Instead, within the structure of our commitment to chosen by their classmates were poised, sophisticated, insightful in their appreciation for, and criticism the individual child, to banishing the useless impediments of formal grades, to celebrating art and its of, a school that they love. And yet I doubt that anyone in in the audience that night regarded them transcendent possibilities, we improvise each day, each moment. The French-Algerian novelist Marie or their fellow graduates as in any sense complete or finished. One phase of their lives and of their Cardinal, describing her sense of anticipation (and anxiety) at a Louis Armstrong concert, wrote: education had drawn to a close but their journey as young adults about to make their way in the world “Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each is just beginning. note would be important and would contain within itself the essence of the whole.”
This may seem obvious, but the current educational environment seems intent on imposing on We, like Armstrong, improvise. Each teacher, each student, encapsulates the entire ethos and spirit of young people at this precise juncture arbitrary measurements or assessments of their worth and Saint Ann’s. We do not seek to recapitulate, but to invigorate each new performance with the same accomplishments. They’ve now achieved certain results on standardized tests. They have been admitted vitality and originality that informed our original composition. We, like our students, were set on a to some colleges and not to others. We are surrounded by and susceptible to value judgments based path by those who came before us. Our future direction only we can determine. on these benchmarks and tempted to judge the impact of their Saint Ann’s education and predict their future success based on who and what we see the night they walk off the stage. Vince Tompkins Head of School That temptation is pernicious. We are better served—and better serve our students—if we instead accept, indeed celebrate, their state of being fundamentally unfinished. Extravagantly talented, yes! But a tidy package of attributes and accomplishments upon which anything approaching a definitive judgment should be rendered? Decidedly not. Too much living, loving, success and failure lie ahead; too many encounters with languages, science, literature, art, and the world await them. All that we should seek to claim at that moment is that we have, in the words of our long-time playwriting teacher Nancy Fales Garrett, “set them on the path.”
This attitude requires a certain kind of humility. Yes we can describe the level of knowledge acquired in history, mastery of poetic form or the critical essay in English, level of fluency in a second or third language. But we should wait a decade or two or three to take the measure of what impact a student’s time at Saint Ann’s will have had. We strive for teaching that touches the souls of our students, and sometimes we see it happening in the moment, but more often than not only patient waiting will reveal how their lives will be different as a result of what they have encountered here. We do not know which verse of Li Bai, which bit of scripture, which line of James Baldwin, which lesson on black holes, which paragraph in a report, which conversation in a stairwell or poem in a hallway will be the thing that our students remember and recall later as a pivot point in their lives. Indeed I am continually astonished at how our teachers approach each day as though every class, every text, every proof might be for their students a moment of profound revelation.
Lucinda, 12th grade
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Synecdoche Winter 2018
A few days before our holiday break we gathered one evening in the sanctuary of St. Ann and the Holy American fiddle tunes, Brahms and Shoshtakovich, Navajo prayer songs, Florence Price and Leonard Trinity for the Choral and Instrumental Concert. Just one event in a typically crowded calendar of Bernstein. Each of these pieces was worthy in its own right, each found a place in the mosaic of the school performances, but those two hours stand out for me as representing the best of what we aspire evening, each was chosen not because of a dictate from above, but from the knowledge and creativity to be, not as an exceptional moment, but as one illustrative of the principles that inform so much of of a faculty committed to the idea that the education of their students is enriched by a seamless what we do at Saint Ann’s. eclecticism and a profound respect for the musical sources and traditions from which each piece is drawn. This reminder that beauty and artistry are not the sole province of any one people or culture The performers that evening spanned our Lower, Middle, and High School. I am particularly fond could not have been more timely, or more welcome. of those moments when we come together as an entire school, for they create an opportunity for our youngest performers to impress their older peers with their enthusiasm and artistry, and for older Vince Tompkins students, in turn, to display the increasing mastery that comes with practice, maturity, and musicality. Head of School These are the moments when bonds are strengthened across our multitude of grades and buildings, for performers and audience alike.
One could not have been in the audience that evening and have failed to be impressed by the breadth of our choral and instrumental programs. Thirty-two of our eighty third-graders performed in the Third Grade Chorus; more than sixty students are members of the Fourth and Fifth Grade Chorus, and over fifty singers are members of the High School Chorus. Each of our instrumental groups that played that evening—Consort, Brass Techniques, Cello Ensemble, Wind Ensemble, Chamber Orchestra, Brass Choir were similarly robust. Our Music Department, beginning with the classes they teach in preschool and kindergarten, make participation for even the most hesitant singers, violinists and recorder beginners a joyful experience rather than a competitive one, and students, thus enticed, then blossom as they discover their potential.
At the same time, as middle schoolers find an instrument—whether its the French horn, the clarinet, or their own voice—that they are committed to, they are encouraged by our extraordinary music teachers to pursue that passion wholeheartedly, and many of the evening’s performances offered glimpses of the emerging brilliance of those students for whom music is a focus of their lives at Saint Ann’s. Enabling students to discover their highest potential, while integrating their individual talent into the ensemble, is both a source of musical beauty and a life lesson. When I encounter some of the more recent buzzwords in education—project-based learning, maker spaces, and so forth—I cannot help but think that we have for decades already incorporated their insights by giving art a central place alongside academics. Through music, theater, photography, dance and painting we constantly remind ourselves and our students that they are first and foremost creators, rather than passive consumers of knowledge. And through their work in these subjects, they learn the rewards of close collaboration, of listening to one another, of commitment to the task at hand.
If the sheer number of participants was one strong impression from this evening, then breadth of repertoire was another. Each of our music teachers seeks pieces that will draw the best from their Marco, 12th grade students, and chooses works that incorporate voices from many cultures and eras: Romani folk dances,
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Our Project Summer 2018 Saint Ann’s cannot heal the crisis of this moment. But we cannot retreat from it either. Our celebration of difference as strength acquires ever deeper significance when tribalism and tribal resentments run amok. Our embrace of the humanities, languages and the arts as fundamental to human existence and to human connection is a basis for resistance to dehumanization. Our deep and creative pedagogy On the next to last day of May, accompanied by a high school jazz quartet, we assembled fourth in science and mathematics signals their vitality at a moment when those in power would devalue through twelfth grade in the lobby of the Bosworth Building, on, around, in front of, and over the their importance and reject the experimentalism and open-mindedness of a scientific world view. Red Stairs. Because of the renovation of the lower floors of the building the last time students had Our commitment to respect for one another, to open dialogue and fierce debate, to an ideal of been able to sit on the Red Stairs had been at the final high school assembly on graduation day 2017. inclusion that embraces the full humanity of each member of our community, give the lie to those So this moment was a long time coming, and a welcome way to end the year. who see homogeneity of thought, expression, or identity as necessary, inevitable, or desirable in this or any other community. Our task is to bring this project to life every day within our walls, knowing To reclaim our spaces—first the townhouses for classrooms and art studios last September, then the that each element is essential to the success of the whole, making space for vulnerability, for bold Undercroft for Music, dance, and Recreational Arts in January—has felt like a process of reclaiming experimentation, for the simple act of trying. ourselves. While disruption and displacement did nothing to diminish the intensity of engagement and the joy of creation, construction simply made it more difficult to be together, find one another, Our physical home stands ready now to sustain this project, and is of a piece with it. Writing of the and connect outside the classroom in the normal course of things. The irony is that so much of the Jefferson Market Library on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, the critic Ada Louise Huxtable once noted work we undertook was meant to meet exactly those needs, along with making the spaces where we that “the atmosphere in which literature and knowledge are dispensed is part of a cultural package…. teach, gather, travel and perform safer and more appropriate for the size of school Saint Ann’s has At Old Jeff there is also the literature of architecture: cut stone faces and flowers, spiral stairs, soaring become. stained glass windows, the feeling, form and sensibility of another age. This, too, is the record of civilization.” With all of this work concluding by the time you are reading this edition of the Saint Ann’s Times, it cannot help but feel like a moment for turning the page. Construction was a project for Saint Ann’s, In a few short weeks we will be return to the task of making within our walls a school that engages but it was not the project that is Saint Ann’s. It is to that project that my attention has turned in these with the world on its own terms, embracing the sacredness of childhood and the capacious record of quiet summer weeks, with a sense of urgency and purpose fed by our own students and teachers and civilizations near and far. Our light will shine bright in the darkness. by the historical moment in which we find ourselves. Vince Tompkins The project of Saint Ann’s is at its heart a humanistic undertaking, a bold reimagining of what Head of School education is and ought to be, of what a school is, of what kind of community we bring together in pursuit of our shared ideals and purposes. Yes we believe that we have created and sustained a pedagogy suited to particularly gifted and motivated children. Yes we reject through the absence of formal grading schemes the notion that the relationship between teacher and student is one based in power and authority rather than mutual respect. Yes we take pride each year in the validation that selective colleges and universities provide for our ongoing experiment. But that is far from the sum of what animates us.
While our educational mission is about the sharing of dreams, it is also “a rich, subtle exploration and questioning of the world.” And the world of 2018 seems to be badly in need of questioning. As I write, the current administration in Washington has finally reversed a policy that had for weeks separated immigrant children from their parents when they attempted to cross our southern border. More than two thousand children have been put into detention facilities—tents in the hot southwestern sun, a former Walmart store, shelters in New York and other cities. And the rhetoric used to justify this action was nothing less than a project in de-humanization, an effort to make of refugees and immigrants an other, undeserving of the protection of the law. The New York Times reports that support for the president enacting this measure has climbed to 90% among members of his own party. Something is wrong. Something is broken.
Portraits by Kindergartners
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Declension Winter 2018-2019 They have to, “put up with the daily routine without ever having known at first hand the thrill of danger or the ecstasy of passion.”
In most circumstances there is nothing wrong with a little mythologizing, of sharing tales of bourgeois Two occurrences of recent months have had me pondering something that intellectual historians call dragons slayed, of classes cut, of great deeds of mischief under the bridge. These shared stories knit us “declension.” The first instance was a chance encounter with an editorial in these pages from thirty- together and create a bond that like any mystic chords of memory shape a shared culture. But living seven years ago titled “Coming of Age.” In it Stanley Bosworth recounted being interviewed by a with the burden of a distorted, oversimplified past can cloud our ability to celebrate what we have in journalist (and Saint Ann’s graduate) “about the heinous rumor that our school has become more the present or to face the future with experimental boldness. Visit any Saint Ann’s classroom today conservative.” “I declared,” Stanley wrote, “that we are, indeed, more conservative than once we were.” and you will not see much laundry or grocery buying in evidence. Instead you will encounter ancient Egypt, Indian creation myths, Baldwin, algebraic functions, audacious theater productions, Coltrane, In his own inimitable style Stanley framed this right turn as a necessary corrective to the inherent special relativity, Vogel, Adichie. You will see Saint Ann’s building on but unconstrained by the legacy failings of the sixties counterculture: a “purely bourgeois decadent—a narcissistic orgy in which the handed to us, and I celebrate. I am ecstatic. surfeited and soft-headed pushed the limits of their self-indulgence….Drugs, affectless promiscuity, messianic separatism were all destructive forces which left the more gullible victims living in little We would not exist were it not for the visionaries and risk-takers in our past. But they were human fringe groups doting on memories of former glories…which were only fantasies.” And so what had as we are, flawed and contradictory and perhaps unable fully at any moment to grasp just what it Saint Ann’s Reagan-era “retrenchment” brought? “We expel druggies. Children have to (and do) was they were bringing into existence. I doubt that any of them would wish to be encased in amber. attend classes…Sixties parents (products of entropy) are implored to impose the limits upon their Institutional age, scale, and yes perhaps even a bit too much respectability threaten our vitality if not children from which they once escaped.” And yet, he declared, “St. Ann’s remains and intends to guarded against. But these should not stop us from thinking of each day and each new year as ours remain a thorn in the side of the traditionalists….We are here to poke fun at the fusty anachronisms of to shape as we choose. We are at once radical and conservative, suspicious of convention and jealous convention. Less subjectivistic and less impulsive than once, perhaps…but—take courage, our young guards of our own traditions and folkways. Whether we are more conservative, or more radical, than alumni, we shall never be respectable!” we once were is a less interesting question to me than whether we are as radical, or as conservative as we want to be in our pursuit of our joyful, celebratory, cerebral, transformative, and irreverent ideals. Not long after I came across this manifesto, our high school students assembled to hear one of their number interview a well-known graduate of the 1990’s who has made a name for himself as a fashion Our task today is to use the freedom we have to invent ourselves anew and to free today’s students designer and entrepreneur. The gist of one of the early questions was essentially, “tell us what it was from the burdens of a mythic past. This is, after all, a school meant to keep today’s children at its like back in the day, before Saint Ann’s got all conservative and started making kids go to class.” center, close to its heart. We can only achieve this, can only greet our students and their limitless There it was: the recurring, haunting fear among our twenty-first century students (and some adults potential, if we can see our collective past in a clearer light, unafraid of the flaws and foibles and as well) that at some point in the undefined past of our school was a moment of purity, ecstasy, failings that it reveals as surely as it reveals our own. Declension be damned! bliss—a time of perfect freedom and intellectual and artistic intensity unfettered by adult-imposed rules, boundaries, or expectations. Stanley’s 1982 jeremiad seemed to confirm that this is not the first generation of students to be haunted by this almost tragic sense of having missed out on a magical Vince Tompkins moment. Head of School
So what? What harm, real or psychic, is done if this mood of longing and regret, this presumption of a lost historical apogee—of a dream not deferred but missed as a first-hand experience—persists in our zeitgeist? Perhaps the myth of a golden moment should simply be accepted as part of our historical baggage. But I think not, and the reason why brings me back to the idea of declension. I’ve had a peculiar fascination with this idea ever since graduate school, when I encountered the writings of Perry Miller, a great scholar of the New England Puritans. In a classic essay on the psychological burdens of the second and third generation of English settlers in New England—those who did not witness the founding first-hand—Miller offers this metaphor: “Many a man has done a brave deed, been hailed as a public hero, had honors and ticker tape heaped upon him—and then had to live, day after day, in the ordinary routine, eating breakfast and brushing his teeth, in what seems protracted anticlimax. A couple may win their way to each other across insuperable obstacles, elope in a blaze of passion and glory—and then have to learn that life is a matter of buying groceries and getting the laundry done.” The Fall of Rome, by 1st graders
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Alma Mater Summer 2019 education. Instead of courses and out of school activities being chosen solely for their intrinsic interest, high school students begin to think about how their transcript will look to an admissions dean. And while we urge students to dive deeply into things they love, a misperception that “more is better” becomes harder to resist. These pressures simply weren’t manifest in anything like this College admissions has been much in the news in 2019 and not for good reason if what one cares magnitude for earlier generations of Saint Ann’s students. about is young people applying to college or the fairness and equity of the process itself. Revelations that wealthy, well-connected parents were colluding with a corrupt private placement counselor and a In the face of this we remain faithful to core beliefs and practices. We believe that the single best handful of coaches were but the latest manifestation that the current system is deeply flawed. It made thing a student can do is to take advantage of the opportunities we afford them for deep exploration this seem an appropriate moment to reflect on the ways in which college admissions has changed and in academics and the arts. We believe that the process of deciding where to apply and where to attend the principles that guide Saint Ann’s as we advise our high school students through a process that can should as much as possible be the student’s process and the student’s decision in consultation with his seem opaque and cruel. or her parents and with advice from our amazing college counselors and high school advisers. We do not steer applicants towards or away from particular institutions for any reasons other than what we It should be said at the outset that the past half-century has seen increasing access to college for think is in each student’s best interest. We do all we can to ensure that each student’s application— a wider segment of high school graduates. Today around 70% of young people age 16-24 in the transcript, personal essay, test scores, description of extracurriculars and other elements—is an honest United States are enrolled in college. In 1965, the year Saint Ann’s was founded, that percentage was representation of his or her activities and accomplishments. We share with applicants our best just above 50%. And differences in enrollment based on gender, race, and class--some of which have strategic advice as they navigate a landscape of colleges’ widely differing approaches to financial aid. stubbornly persisted--were even greater than they are today. We advise students that whatever admissions patterns may prevail at a particular college or university are unreliable predictors of the chances of success of any individual applicant. And we strongly For many reasons--population growth, the adoption by most colleges of the Common Application, encourage our students and their families throughout the process to focus on questions of personal fit a growing commitment to need-based financial aid among the wealthiest private colleges, a broader and happiness rather than selectivity or prestige as the surest signposts towards a successful outcome. swath of public secondary schools that prepare more of their graduates for college, and so on--the number of applications received by selective colleges both private and public has skyrocketed. Schools Each year our seniors collectively apply to more than one hundred colleges and universities—small that most Saint Ann’s graduates a decade or two ago might once have thought of as relatively safe liberal arts colleges, large state universities, private research universities, conservatories—and in a bets for admission are now far from that: last year NYU received 84,000 applications; the University typical year our graduates class attend forty or so of those institutions. We are committed to equity, of Michigan received 65,000 applications for the Class of 2022. Selectivity at nearly every school to to the agency and individuality of each student, to support all of our students wherever they choose which our students apply has changed sharply, as these examples of admit rates comparing 1987 to to apply. This is how it should be, and whatever changes the current debate may produce, we will 2018 attest: Brown has gone from 19% to 7%; Colby from 43% to 13%; Duke from 28% to 8%; continue to let these principles guide us in our work. Middlebury from 30% to 17%; and Wesleyan from 38% to 17%. Very few selective institutions have expanded the number of undergraduate seats available in spite of enormous demand from tens of thousands of qualified applicants, even as they have sought to increase the proportion of matriculants Vince Tompkins who are international students, first generation students, students from racially diverse backgrounds, Head of School and students from public high schools.
Is it any wonder then that the recent scandal revealed that parents with more means than scruples have sought to game the system in favor of their children, seeing admission to selective colleges as a golden ticket in an age of anxiety and uncertainty? But to focus on the outrageous and illegal behavior of several dozen parents, one professional independent college adviser, and a handful of athletic officials at a few institutions is to avoid discussion of other features of the process, from athletic recruitment and legacy status to the impact that family income and other factors can have on colleges’ admission decisions.
As the report on admissions for the Saint Ann’s Class of 2019 elsewhere in this issue shows, Saint Ann’s graduates continue to enjoy remarkable success in gaining admission to colleges and universities around the country and internationally. And yet the perceived pressures and expectations of the process do threaten the joyful, live-in-and-for-the-moment ethos that is central to a Saint Ann’s
Henry Lee, 5th grade
2 3 A LETTER FROM VINCE
Reading
Books have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Being at the young end of a large alphabet, to surfing the net while listening to Coldplay and sending tweets. None of these activities family meant that books my siblings had read for school or pleasure were all over the house, and a is hardwired or has genes specifically dedicated to its development; they are cultural inventions that library card was one of my proudest possessions. When the oldest of my siblings had entered the involve cortical takeovers.” workforce after college they’d often arrive for a visit home with the gift of children’s books which I’d eagerly devour. Among my earliest childhood memories are a well-worn copy of an illustrated Mother Culture, and within culture the role of technology, is a concern to a growing number of people who Goose, Tim to the Lighthouse, Make Way for Ducklings, Wait for William, and a growing shelf of other care about reading, myself included. I have found over the past decade that my own ability to sit titles. quietly with a book for an hour or two has been eroded. For all of its magical properties reading rarely provides what one former Facebook employee called “the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops I cannot claim in spite of this to have always been the most avid of readers, or to have been any less that we have created.” Count yourself lucky if you have not experienced the impulsive, sometimes susceptible than my peers to the distractions of childhood. Our house had a single small black and irresistible desire mid-sentence to reach for your smartphone (is it, really?) under the pretext of looking white television, and I felt its powerful pull on weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. For the something up, or checking your news feed, or because (like Pavlov’s dog) your attention has been longest time my siblings and I believed that our house was curiously susceptible to electrical blackouts summoned by a ping, a bell, a chirp. One senses that the very nature of reading has changed, that the that seemed to occur with mysterious consistency, until we realized that my mother’s method for focus and concentration and critical thinking that deep reading requires are at war inside our skulls limiting our TV consumption was to sneak to the basement and unscrew the fuse for the television with new and different impulses, pleasures, distractions and habits for which the antidote is not the outlet. But to this day when I’m asked about the best job I’ve ever had, a top contender is my job in simple unscrewing of a fuse. the summer of 1976. I was an attendant at a beach parking lot that would fill up by 10:00am or so. From that moment until the end of the day, I could simply hang the chain across the entrance and sit So what? Must our laptops, phones, tablets, and watches go onto the trash heap (I ask while typing and read, virtually uninterrupted. It was blissful. this essay on my laptop)? Or is this worry simply the whining of hidebound traditionalists like myself, with graying hair and cranky knees who haven’t truly grasped the positive potential of these The pleasure of falling into a book is unlike anything new technologies? It is true that we have heard variations on this concern for a very long time. No else. I’ve read novels that altered if not physical reality sooner had literacy become widespread in the United States than you had intellectuals like the now- itself then certainly my perception of it. I recently obscure poet Vachel Lindsay proclaiming, more than described to a colleague a memory of being home alone a century ago, that “American civilization grows more one night when I was twelve or thirteen, deep into Bram hieroglyphic every day.” Lindsay bemoaned a culture Stoker’s Dracula. An actual pack of wolves howling at whose literacy was threatened by the advertising the window could not have provoked any deeper sense billboard, the commercial photograph, the moving of dread than what I felt that night, sitting perfectly safe picture. If reading prospered and adapted amidst those in a familiar place with no literal dangers to be found. challenges, why worry now? Reading can provoke or inspire the widest imaginable range of responses—joy, exhilaration, disgust, pathos, I worry because the young readers we cultivate at Saint empathy. It stretches the world far beyond the Ann’s will only in rare instances have the experience limitations of our own experience, simultaneously of reading free of interruption and distraction. And feeding and drawing upon our powers of imagination that worries me because reading is a path to treasures and discovery. of enormous value and importance, among them the ability to think critically about the world we inhabit and Reading is miraculous in another sense, or at least steward and the expansion of our horizons beyond the accidental. The human brain did not evolve specific confines of clan and community. How hard will they neural networks to derive from symbols on a stone have to fight to report the same sensation of books that Zadie Smith wrote of recently: “I lived in them tablet or a papyrus or a page a shared interpretation or and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield”? Can meaning. Instead, as Maryanne Wolf explains in Reader, the instantaneous access we now enjoy to vast storehouses of knowledge with the swipe of a screen Come Home, the “reading brain” deploys capacities that develop the same ability to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lie, empathy from enmity that evolved for other purposes—including vision and language—relying on the human brain’s remarkable deep reading cultivates? plasticity to work in novel ways. Wolf writes, “the ability to form newly recycled circuits permits us to learn all manner of genetically unplanned-for activities—from making the first wheel, to learning the
2 3 I do not know, nor do I mean to condemn the tools of modern life. But I know I feel at home in a school in which the art of reading closely, deeply, and attentively is nurtured like a tender shoot by teachers across our departments and divisions—and not simply in precincts like English, History, Theater, and languages that have the most obvious stake in a culture of reading. And I do know that when I am asked for my thoughts on how Saint Ann’s equips its graduates with “twenty-first century skills,” I think of reading and all that can follow from it as one of the keystones of what it means to be an educated person, a citizen, a life-long learner, an artist or scientist or humanist. Those are skills fit for any century.
Vince Tompkins Head of School
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