FALL 2009Drew Smith
Head of School
It seems clear to many of us at Friends School that we, and in fact schools everywhere, are standing on the fault line of “what was” and “what’s next.” The model for the school day, the silo-system of academic subjects, and the agrarian, annual school calendar are all likely to replaced in the 21st Century with something else. What that something else will be is a wide-open debate. With this in mind, I thought I’d share with all of you just a few of the critical questions that we are struggling with here in order that the Friends School remain a viable and vital institution well into the next century:
- If our Mullica Hill location requires all of our faculty and students to use fossil fuel–powered transportation to attend school each day, is the school in an appropriate location in a world where fossil fuel will be far less abundant and increasingly more expensive? Are we in the right place?
- If the world and its institutions now operate on a 24-hour schedule, does the 9 am to 3 pm academic day still make sense? How can the annual school calendar continue to make sense if families no longer harvest crops together in the summer?
- If schools and their teachers no longer maintain a monopoly on academic information because of the rise of the Internet, how will the role of a teacher change? What are the most critical aspects of a teacher’s work that the school must maintain despite changes in the information delivery system that in some ways no longer requires human gatekeepers?
- If it is true that the cost of running an independent school, college, or university already feels out of reach for most families, how can institutions like Friends School change their cost structures significantly and still maintain the most important aspects of their missions? How do we slash our prices by 50%, for example, and deliver the same highquality education for our students?
- If the world and its people are connected together in ways never before possible, why would we still call ourselves Friends School Mullica Hill (N.J., U.S.A.)? If geography will matter less and less, why couldn’t we enroll students from somewhere like the Congo? or China? or Detroit?
The years ahead are likely to be fraught with anxiety for schools and the people who attend and work in them. We will leave the familiar behind to engage our students and parents in ways we will be inventing as we go along. I am confident that we will design programs that will not work, develop some unsustainable cost structures, and make mistakes in judgment about programs for our students.
As discouraging as some of our future work may be, I have confidence that our school’s foundation in Quakerism will help to maintain a sense of optimism about our common future. We do have a choice about how we embrace and accept that future. In fact, George Fox made clear in 1656 that only through embracing and accepting our everunfolding futures will it be possible to even imagine what’s next: “Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering to that of God in every one.”
We look forward to including Salem Quarter in the future of Friends School.
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Last modified:
Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 03:42 PM
