Chip Miller, Head of Upper School
Working for the Future: Moving Through the Present and Trusting in Transformation
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Independent School magazine. View the original article.
Conversations with parents are not always easy, and the difficult ones have become more difficult. Recently, I was discussing this with a parent who was surprised when I expressed gratitude for her part in a pleasant, constructive conversation. Honestly, I wanted to hug her. She asked about difficult conversations, and I found myself explaining what it’s like to have parents or students say, “You work for me!” before demanding better grades. The parent I was meeting with was shocked, but we quickly moved on to more pleasant topics. Later, out of nowhere, she looked at me and asked, “Who do you think you work for?” I answered without thinking: “I work for the future.” That answer caught both of us by surprise.
Asking who we work for is essentially asking about why we teach. Why do we make students study so many different academic disciplines? Do students who will become engineers really need to study poetry? Is it our place to say that they must? Is our overall goal to graduate citizens or professionals? These are important questions, and there probably should be some consensus around the answers we give.
When I was a history teacher trying to explain this to students, I’d say that we take events from the past, turn them into lessons in the present, and learn how to make decisions about the future. Most students understand this. Another concept that’s harder for students to grasp, however: “Our job is to take off our shoes, go to a different time and place and put on someone else’s shoes, then look back at ourselves from that new position.” They discover that it’s incredibly difficult to see our own shoes, and it’s even more difficult to take them off. Standing in a different place and looking at ourselves, learning what we can about our beliefs and our actions, is not easy—and it can’t be done if we don’t understand that we are standing in a specific position, wearing a specific set of beliefs, and that this place where we stand is not the truth. It is but a position, though hopefully a good one. But these are the arguments of a humanities teacher.
We do so much more in our schools, and we must speak to a larger sense of purpose. Decisions about our work in the present must also reflect a commitment to the future. When schools focus intentionally on skills development, choosing content to support that focus, they can transform what educators have always championed—the growth of an engaged and informed generation ready to navigate and lead in a complex and changing world. But how do we know if we’re succeeding? Measuring student growth over time feels elusive, so how can schools better lean into living out their purpose?
Training or Education
In the 1960 book The Firmament of Time, author Loren Eiseley wrote that “[s]choolrooms are not and should not be the place where man learns only scientific techniques. They are the place where selfhood, what has been called ‘the supreme instrument of knowledge,’ is created.” Eiseley was speaking to science professors, but it is an answer we might apply to any discipline. The fit may be less obvious for some, but when we think about skills rather than content, it’s easier to see. Whether we are talking about the logical, problem-solving skills so easily emphasized in geometry, or the development of creative intelligence in a drawing class, one can easily argue that the range of skills and understanding prioritized through a liberal arts education all contribute to the strengthening of Eiseley’s notion of selfhood. Developing strong individuals, those who speak from a well-developed sense of self and who seek to serve the larger community, is surely focused on the future.
One problem with this focus is that progress is not always easy to measure. There is perhaps an element of faith that goes with educating for the future, but any teacher who has stayed at one school long enough to see former students return as healthy, happy, and successful adults knows that we can measure ourselves by more than simple faith. We must assess ourselves as educators, adjusting as needed, but we are losing patience with long-term indicators. A simple and tangible present is crowding out a more complex focus on the future. We have become less comfortable waiting to see what sort of 40-year-olds our education has produced. Educating for the present, or for an immediate future measured in test scores, college placement, and the launching of careers, is easier to quantify.
In A Continuous Harmony, Wendell Berry’s concern that we cannot distinguish between training and education highlights the tension between educating for the present and the future. Training, which he describes as “a highly efficient procedure” through which we may teach “a prescribed pattern of facts and functions,” clearly has its place. But training is beginning to replace education, which Berry describes as “an obscure process by which a person’s experience is brought into contact with his place and his history. … A person’s education begins before his birth, in the making of the disciplines, traditions, and attitudes of mind that he will inherit, and it continues until his death under the slow, expensive, uneasy tutelage of his experience.” That’s difficult to quantify, and in our outcomes-based world, it’s not surprising that a stronger focus on training might be appealing. Yet even in the most practical terms, one might argue that where training helps us get the job, education helps us keep it and thrive in it.
Another way to think about educating for the future would be to consider the difference between transformational and affirmational pedagogies. Transformational schools proceed from the assumption that students can and should work toward some version of their best selves, thus working for the future. Affirmational schools tell students, and their parents, that they are already wonderful, working for the present.
While schools are being called on to relieve anxieties that existed well before the pandemic, and as we stare at an uncertain future amid a difficult present, affirmation feels safe and transformation feels risky. With transformation comes discomfort. It takes time. It requires effort, challenge, risk-taking, perseverance, and, most important, a willingness to admit to and learn from mistakes. Yet however much a transformational education requires that we face uncomfortable challenges, it is also inherently optimistic.
As bell hooks wrote in Teaching Community: Pedagogy of Hope, “My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.” The transformation hooks describes is both personal and civic. Transformational schools prioritize both healthier and stronger individuals and better members of our community.
Present Tense
I worked with a student who once refused to attend a required class called “Ethics and Responsibility.” He had resisted other classes that didn’t seem immediately practical to him, and his parents supported this resistance. We had a long talk and somewhere along the way, I asked him why he resisted classes through which he might get to know himself. His answer was explosive: “I don’t have time to get to know myself! I’ll do that when I’ve finished college and when I’m rich!” There are many problems here, but one striking and practical concern is that he was thinking more about getting a job than about keeping it or being happy doing it.
So many people accept the false dichotomy that educating for citizenship conflicts with educating for success. The attributes found in healthy individuals, in engaged members of a strong community, are the same qualities essential to long-term professional success. Can anyone argue that self-awareness; community awareness; global awareness; flexibility; the ability to collaborate, analyze, synthesize, compromise, and communicate; and an inclination to hold oneself accountable and to actively engage are not also qualities of a successful professional?
On the other hand, when we focus on a set of skills specific to a college major or entry-level career, we circumvent broader skills that are essential to both citizenship and professional growth. An increased focus on STEM and entrepreneurship programs, for example, both of which can offer wonderful opportunities for creative thinking, can and will play into the simpler demands of educating for the present if we are not careful. To the degree that they emphasize specialization over broad understanding, any program conflicts with educating for citizenship, or the future.
Choosing education for the present also affects DEIJB initiatives. Affirmational education is not only short-sighted in this context—it is often a denial of the complexities of a world changing around us. We may focus on the simple, the present, the practical, “the way things are” because we are uncomfortable considering the way things could be, the way things ought to be. Again, transformation can be scary, and the transformation that comes with embracing a multidisciplinary education or a multicultural world, exciting as that is to some, scares too many of us, largely because of what it asks of us.
hooks writes, “Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the narrow boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared in the classroom. It forces us all to recognize our complicity in accepting and perpetuating biases of any kind.” Educating for the future requires that we shift our pedagogy, including the choices we make about the skills we emphasize and the content we choose to facilitate the development of those skills, accepting a more inclusive and complex understanding of the world around us.
Measuring Success
How engaged is our adult population? Do we understand what is happening around us? Are we able to discern fact from fiction? Can we make and defend an argument? Are we willing to change our minds, to judge our positions and adjust based on new information? Can we accept complexity, resisting the siren song of the simple, predictable, and “safe,” understanding as well that what feels safe for us may not feel safe for others? Are we making good career decisions? Are corporations making responsible long-term decisions? Are we happy?
The answers to these questions tell us more about education in general than they do about individual schools, and they are more a measure of education from decades past than they are about the present, but they can guide us in how we prepare our students for the decades ahead.
If we work for the future, the answers to these questions suggest that we have a lot of work to do. While a general read on American education may help us get started, individual schools need a way to measure themselves, gathering information and creating opportunities to grow and improve. We might start with a broad understanding of the goals of a liberal arts education, asking ourselves if we are graduating adults who can think logically, sequentially, methodologically, analytically, collaboratively, culturally, creatively, ethically, and responsibly. We could then tailor that understanding to include the specifics of our own mission statements and core values.
This may sound too abstract, but it does not have to be. What if, for the spring of our students’ final year, we create an assignment or project that asks them to demonstrate the skills we believe to be most valuable in each of our schools? In creating such a project, a school will more clearly articulate its own objectives while at the same time establishing a way to assess its success in achieving these objectives. If most students can effectively demonstrate most or all of these skills, the school will know it has succeeded. If not, the school will have identified areas for improvement in its curriculum. This is also an opportunity for students to practice those crucial skills, bringing them together in a creative and independent way.
Perhaps most important, a project like this would allow schools to explain to parents why they do what they do, how they educate for the future, in a concise, authoritative, and compelling way. Such a project acknowledges the cumulative, sequential nature of education, just as it acknowledges that we must develop in the present those skills we believe to be most crucial for the future.
This work is daunting, but the wonderful thing about working for the future is that we have time to adjust. It’s easy to be hopeful when you have the future to guide you. No doubt there are adjustments to be made. But there is time, there is hope, and there is noble purpose. We work for the future, and the future we can imagine is worth our time.