HEAD OF SCHOOL LETTER
Sophia vs. Phronesis “Look, Look, Look!” exhorted the biology teacher to the students standing at lab tables around the room. In one hand, she was holding a sheep’s eyeball, and in the other hand, a scalpel. Her students, in groups of two, all had the same equipment and were talking excitedly with each other as they dissected the eyeballs. There was not a student in the class that seemed disengaged, distracted, or disgusted. Instead, they appeared as if they were young medical students, not your typical 10th graders. This talented teacher had prefaced the lab by explaining that a number of animals have the ability to see much better than humans at night, including sheep, and had the students ponder how this might be possible. The students had proposed a host of reasons and were eager to test their ideas against the anatomy they were in the process of dissecting. This lesson had played right into our natural
Head of School Adam K. Man P’15 and All-School President Doug Baker ’22 compete to see how many student names they can remember during the first Friday Assembly of the 2021-2022 school year.
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curiosity to understand how things work, to take things apart, and to try to understand the operational structures that make our universe work — even if it was just in the microcosm of a sheep’s eye. The search for understanding of how things work stretches back to our earliest ancestors. It has been a driving force throughout human history. Even today, you see a spark to understand in the youngest of infants and it stays with us until our final days. It is one of the two great questions that drive all meaningful educational endeavors. The other great question asks how things matter. What does it all mean? What is of value? What gives our lives meaning? If you stumble into a good literature classroom, you will see this question debated and discussed daily. What made Jay Gatsby great? Is Okonkwo’s death in Things Fall Apart brave or cowardly? Is Holden Caulfield a hero? Questions like these help us think through our own lives. They help us wrestle with powerful ideas about how to act and what is truly important. Unfortunately, if you visit many classrooms in schools around the globe, it will appear that we have lost sight of these questions. The focus seems to be on being able to recall or memorize a set of facts or details that are far removed from these two big questions. Asking students to select the correct answer among the five possible multiple choice answers is more pressing than living a life full of meaning. Getting an “A” on the math quiz is more important than actually understanding how or why you might ever use mathematics to better understand the natural world.
