a MESSAGE from the HEAD CONTENTS 2 Message from George Davison
Beyond Socrates Tools for excellent teaching
4 High School Opening Celebration 8 Leading Donors Reception
W
hile society evolves and transforms, the education industry has been criticized for remaining essentially unchanged. If you were step into WABAC machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame, and travel back 2400 years to Athens, you would find Socrates in his olive grove surrounded by 16 to 20 students engaging in dialogue. How is it possible that the basic set-up of the classroom has not changed? Yes, we now have books, pencils, desks, iPads, SMARTBoards, heat and A/C, but what is really going on in class is the interchange between the students and the teacher. Socrates was one heck of a great teacher. Everyone knew it then, and we still read his work and model his style today. He set the standard—but for 2400 years? If education has not changed because it relies on the teacher, why haven’t we improved on the concept of a teacher? Last year, I participated in a panel discussion where one of the panelists posed that school reform would never truly succeed because, in his words, “excellent teaching was not scalable.” Machines have taken over many formerly human tasks at a consistently excellent level and at a much lower cost and are easily replicated for larger and larger markets. The panelist’s lament was that there just were not enough humans with the skills and inclination to deliver excellent education to the increasing number of students. Thomas Edison thought motion pictures were the answer and that schools would teach using movies. While film has enhanced learning, no one believes that the one-way communication of a movie is sufficient. Chris Whittle and Benno Schmidt thought that they had the scalability issue licked with the Edison Project, where the excellent teachers would be in a TV studio and lessons would be delivered to students via satellite with only teaching assistants required in the classrooms. The Internet has given rise to several different iterations of this same idea. Some are for-profit ventures and are completely virtual, like Rosetta Stone, the University of Phoenix and the Kahn Academy. Colleges with campuses like Stanford and Harvard have their own version, though they still include instructors in the mix.
10 Sandy 12 Meet Your Trustees 13 News Around School 21 Tell Zelda 22 New Faculty and Staff 24 Teachers Going Places 26 Alumni Profile: Emi Knafo ’96 30 Alumni News
GCS NEWS Fall 2012 No. 48 Director of Development
Joyce Kuh Associate Director of Development
Tia Biasi Communications Director
Kate Marcus Database Manager
Robert K. Brown Development Assistant
Ryann Supple Photography
Jean-Robert Andre Tia Biasi Kim Chaloner Tivadar Divéki Arvind Grover Joyce Kuh Kate Marcus Jacob Perman Rebecca Pitler Dan Rufer Eric Schneider Ryann Supple Design
The Blank Page New York, NY GCS News is published for students, parents, alumni and friends of the school.
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Can school be a communication between a human and a machine? We at GCS have invested heavily in information technology, but none of it replaces the human-to-human interaction. Our technology-based tools are designed to enhance teacher-student communication. These tools, akin to a hammer or a saw, make the human task easier. As with any tool, students must be taught how to use technology safely and with expertise. You would never hand a student a hammer and saw without including basic training in their use. Tablets now provide lightweight texts for greater utility than the old-fashioned textbook. Multi-media access allows students and teachers to go more deeply into subject matter. With technology,
“Can we identify what has made Socrates a teacher for the ages even though he taught without any tangible tools? ” the danger is more likely to be distraction rather than injury. Nevertheless, instruction in the safe use of tools remains an important task of the school. The question remains, for what sort of future are we preparing our students? There is no question that the machine will be ubiquitous in their lives. That is not a new change; the rise of machines came at the end of the nineteenth century, and what we have now are merely different machines. The key is that our students must be ready to interact easily with a variety of intelligences, including machines and their offshoots, like artificial intelligences, in order to be poised for success in the future. Thomas Edison’s revolutionary plan did not succeed because the motion picture, while allowing information to enter into the human consciousness through the visual realm, is unidirectional and as such, not an interaction. Online schools are multidirectional and responsive, but are only two-dimensional, which is why the more effective ones bring the teaching assistant model to bear. With the power and wealth of one of the world’s great universities to