Ahead of the Curve

In August of 2007 I wrote in this column about how we try to find a good balance at EDS for the educative value of challenge and disappointment:

We want to protect our children and delay the loss of innocence that is part of the human condition. We want to build confidence and self-esteem, while simultaneously teaching the value of challenge and struggle.  We want to teach acceptance, understanding, and brotherly love, while recognizing that everyone will not always get along well with everyone else. Let’s set a goal this year to diminish our push for perfection.  Let’s embrace challenge and occasional disappointment.  Let’s try to bring that natural spirit of playfulness to our collective efforts to raise healthy, competent children.  This is an exciting time to be a citizen of the world.  It is also a challenging time.  Let’s commit ourselves to working together to help equip a generation of EDS students to have a meaningful impact on their world.

Again in January of 2010, I wrote about a Francis Drake poem that proclaims the value of challenge and leaving “comfort zones.”

And now the education world is abuzz about an article in this July’s Atlantic Monthly, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/), in which the author discusses the implications of parents’ obsession with their children’s “happiness.” She claims that we are making it more difficult for our children to grow into healthy happy adults by shielding them from discomfort and failure.

But at EDS we had already advanced the conversation further.  Through our leadership in the Elementary Schools Research Collaborative (ESRC), we had already begun work on a project with Educational Testing Services to develop a first-of-its-kind assessment for middle school students in important non-academic but mission-centric areas.  One of these areas is the key to making failure and disappointment a learning experience: resilience. Other characteristics we are assessing are ethical decision-making, intrinsic motivation, collaboration, creative problem solving, and time management.

At EDS we are not just talking about these skills. We are defining and describing them, and we are partnering with some of the best K-8 schools and cognitive psychologists in the country to learn how to assess and impact them.

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (the education issue) carried the following headline, “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=all).  It’s an interesting notion.  Woven into the article are comments about the importance of “grit” and resilience.  This is something that we not only know about at EDS, but we are actively doing something about it.  Because it matters.

At EDS we balance good, solid traditional education with an equal focus on the new demands of the 21^st century – without becoming victim to mere fads.  And it is clearly paying off. Our graduates report higher and higher levels of satisfaction and preparation.

The teachers truly are building foundations for learning and for life.  While the rest of the world talks about it, we see the results every day. Don’t forget to thank an EDS teacher.

What a Difference

You cannot believe what a difference it makes and so you take it for granted. I first observed it in the fall of 1977. I was a high school junior beginning a 2-year Advanced Placement course of study in English at a rigorous college prep boys’ school. The class produced 9 National Merit Semi-Finalists; 2 went to Harvard, 1 to MIT, 1 to UNC as a Morehead Scholar, 1 to UVA, and on and on. Despite the talent in the room, when the conversations about the reading would begin, there was often a distinct group who left the rest of us in their dust. The group was not divided by GPA or by writing ability; they weren’t identifiably “smarter” than the others. The clear difference was the depth of their knowledge of the Bible.

Now, I had taken plenty of Sunday school, sang in the church choir for a while, and had even read the “Good News” version of the New Testament on my own. But in my class there was a group of students who understood the Bible as much more than a collection of simple stories with simple meaning, as it mostly appeared to me. They seemed to grasp the complexity of the text as a whole. They talked about the stories as if they were about real, complex people seeking truth in the face of the ambiguities of the human experience. They didn’t always read the stories as about right and wrong or good versus evil, but often as about seeming conflicts between two goods, or the need to choose the lesser of two evils. In short, they understood the Bible to be more relevant to our world than I had ever realized.

This observation was reinforced years later when I was a high school English teacher. It did not take long at all to determine which of my students had a keen grasp of the Bible, which had only a surface familiarity with the stories, and which were completely clueless. And those distinctions usually translated into performance differences.

Recently I came across some research that supports those observations. According to a 1986 study, when college English professors were asked which book they wished incoming freshmen had read, the Bible was most frequently named. An analysis of Advanced Placement (AP) literature prep course revealed that 60% of the allusions were from the Bible. In a survey of high school English teachers, 90% said that Bible knowledge “confers a distinct advantage on students…for both college-bound and regular students.” Although it can be difficult to reach agreement as to how to measure Biblical literacy, in study after study, teachers estimate that only a small minority of their students – in public or private schools – are sufficiently familiar with the Bible.

The academic and intellectual advantage is not just in literature. How does one fully understand the development of western society, culture, art, politics and even law, without fully understanding the story of the people and the influence of the Book? And yet fewer than 25% of public schools include a unit or lesson on the Bible within the curriculum and fewer than 8% of all schools offer courses in Bible.

Our religion curriculum is second to none in Augusta or the Episcopal school world in the United States. Developing Bible literacy is an important cornerstone in the Episcopal Day School’s mission of helping these students build foundations for learning and for life, and just another measure of the value you have added by investing in their future. In fact, I would argue that this program alone justifies the difference.