Ad Summum Volume 1, Issue 1
October 2013
Kew-Forest: A Hotbed of Learning and an Oasis of Civility
T
he Model T was one of the worst things to happen to American education. By the 1920’s its enormous success suggested to our nation that the Henry Ford assembly line model could, and should, be applied to education and schools, making them “efficient” places where students moved assemblylike through days of drill-and-fill, mug-and-jug fact learning led by all-knowing supervisors (teachers). This created schools that, to this day, look like factories inside and out, low-slung industrial designs with hose-down architecture and desks in rows where students see only the backs of each other’s heads. For a host of reasons, our nation moved quickly from the small, highly-individualized, cross-agegrouped schoolrooms of the 19th century (romanticized by the oneroom schoolhouse) to outsized, impersonal institutions not of hundreds but, often, of thousands of students where recitation and rote learning were not only de rigeur but necessary for order -- and where students often no longer felt connected.
A
t about the same time, in 1918, The Kew-Forest School was conceived and built on a very different model: that students are best-prepared in small classrooms with an able Faculty where a classical, core curriculum stresses depth, not breadth, written and oral communication, foreign language (including Latin), mathematics, science, the humanities, athletics, the arts, citizenship, and student organizations in an inti-
mate setting of warmth, high expectations, and caring.
T
he model could not have been more different for its day, or more right. Today, as debate swirls around the “new” Common Core Standards that demand that millions of public school students in 46 states master fewer things in greater depth, what has been practiced at Kew-Forest for nearly a century is reaffirmed as not only modern and relevant but leading edge. Work here is spiral and recursive, with depth of learning its goal. Alumni/ae tell us that decade after decade Kew-Forest has taught students not what to think but how to think, and both what to learn and how to learn.
Work here is spiral and recursive, with depth of learning its goal... Kew-Forest has eschewed the vocational or pre-professional training now so trendy in charter and magnet schools. “Pre-law” and “premedical” high schools ask adolescents to “specialize” well before they write well, have read deeply, think critically, speak convincingly, lead persuasively, make mature decisions regularly, synthesize large quantities of material effectively,
— Headmaster Mark Fish, Ed.M. read and write another language, serve others, take personal responsibility for their actions, lead healthy lives, juggle sports and extracurricular activities, and see themselves in a global context. High school should be a time to do all of those things, and to begin to do them well. Indeed, we rob our students if we do not give them the “whole school, whole student” opportunity to flourish as scholar-citizen-athletes at every step of their School career. As we renew and reward Faculty excellence, as we strengthen inquiry-based learning around our new seminar tables in the Upper School, as we prepare our students to go on with success at highly competitive colleges and universities, we shall continue to be a community of grace and courtesy that values equally the intellectual, ethical, and personal growth of each of our students.
H
ow special and how rare to be both an oasis of civility and a hotbed of learning.