Friday, February 15, 2019

Is The End Game For Our Students College Acceptance?

Our Mission
Greensboro Day School develops
the intellectual, ethical, and interpersonal
foundations students need
to become constructive
contributors to the world.

A recent note from an alum and past parent urged me to reconsider our mission statement to include a sentence saying that we are a college preparatory school. He believed that parents chose our school to ensure that their children get into the best possible colleges and that if we left out  "college preparatory" many parents would not seek us out.

On the surface, I agree with him. Our parents do expect us to prepare their children for entrance into the best possible colleges and we have an excellent track record of doing just that. But, what a short sighted view of the purpose of a well rounded high school education.

Ex-Yale professor William Deresiewicz, in his recent book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, speaks of the "elite" who attend prestigious universities, many of whom come from independent schools like ours.

“The irony, then, is this. Elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, teaching, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science. It is true that today’s young people appear to be more socially engaged, as a whole, than kids have been for several decades: more concerned about the state of the world and more interested in trying to do something about it. It is true, as well, that they are more apt to harbor creative or entrepreneurial impulses. But it is also true, at least at the most selective schools, that even if those aspirations make it out of college — a very big “if” — they tend to be played out within the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, and prestige.

We believe that high school should be a time of exploration and discovery about both who a student is and who that student may want to become. Through providing an engaging curriculum taught by teachers who care about students and the subject matter along with a broad array of opportunities in music, art, ceramics, theater, sports, community service and various clubs we believe that students will find opportunities to learn more about themselves and their interests.

Participating in activities outside the classroom should not become badges earned to be placed on a college application, but rather fully engaged in for self-discovery and learning. 

Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite: the grades, the scores, the trophies. That is what you’re praised for; that is what you are rewarded for. Your parents brag; your teachers glow; your rivals grit their teeth.

Finally, the biggest prize of all, the one that draws a line beneath your adolescence and sums you up for all the world to see: admission to the college of your dreams. Or rather, not finally — because the game, of course, does not end there. College is naturally more of the same. Now the magic terms are GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright, MCAT, Harvard Law, Goldman Sachs. They signify not just your fate, but your identity; not just your identity, but your value. They are who you are, and what you’re worth.”

“The result is what we might refer to as credentialism. The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume. Hence the constant sense of competition. (If you want to increase participation in an activity, a Stanford professor told me, make entry to it competitive.)”

The problem here, as I see it, is the potential for our students to fall into the "credentialing" mind set where they are constantly setting their goals and measuring themselves by what they believe others - their mothers, fathers, relatives, teachers, potential employers, and friends - want to see or want them to be. Someone else is always telling them who they are and who they should be. And, at the end of their formal schooling what do they do when real life hits them and they need to make their own decisions?

I am in great hopes that our students and their parents will choose a college not based on which college is more prestigious, but the one that most fits with their family values and the student's passions and interests. As Maya Angelou reminds us, "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."





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