Anyone else inspired by these words from Tad Roach, Head of School at St. Andrew’s in Delaware:
“…many private secondary schools have forgotten the public spirit and mission that brought them into existence in the first place. In their anxiety to attract students and families, they stopped thinking about and enacting a distinct mission, and instead embraced an anxious and empty pursuit of individualism at all costs. Students notice the change, the anxiety, the insecurity of their school’s value system, and they either play the game of school or dream of communities that ask the best of them.”
“What we have attempted to do at St. Andrew’s is change the narrative of private education. Rather than asserting that the private school is all about expressing and enacting privilege, elitism, and preference, St. Andrew’s asserts that our work is contributing powerfully to what the great novelist George Eliot described as “the growing good of the world.” As our country and world suffer from failures of communication and cooperation, as we seek to define what is true and what is false, as we see a decline of civility and an increase in obscene words, acts, and attributes, St. Andrew’s as a high school articulates, defends, and enacts a different way, an approach to life, to study, and to community that is generous, kind, optimistic, and hopeful. Values matter; principles matter; generosity and kindness matter, not only in these hallways but in the world. St. Andrew’s graduates carry a spirit of courage and enlightenment that enable them to serve the world.”
Yes, Tad is the real deal and the sole reason we chose to send our DD to SAS where she is now a senior. Amazing school from top to bottom. If I have the opportunity to make a gift to preserve his legacy, will do so in a heartbeat.
You know, I have no horse in this race, but I have to say that based upon everything I have read about Tad Roach over the years, I do regret not having looked at SAS when I was doing my boarding school search.
Funny: I find his words, tone and rhetoric to be the worst kind of elitist condescension. Like a government bureaucrat moralizing to the great unwashed. ( In essence all non profit employees are government bureaucrats.) And honestly…what school’s motto or mission has ever been “about expressing and enacting privilege, elitism, and preference.”
“As our country and world suffer from failures of communication and cooperation, as we seek to define what is true and what is false…” Ummm really… I hope no one actually wants some high school principal telling anyone what is true and what is false. That isn’t education that is indoctrination.
Not true, @Center. I really do hope my student learns to discern actual fact from fiction as part of her education. Scientific evidence of climate change should carry more weight than an uninformed claim that it isn’t real.
And while people are entitled to hold the opinion that the Earth is flat, that doesn’t mean it is.
I want my student to value facts and scientific inquiry. I want her to have the skills to determine the veracity of information. And I want her to use her talents and gifts for the greater good, not just for her own personal enrichment or glory. Service to others matters to us. So does kindness.
Many schools claim to share those values, which is why I found it shocking at one school when our perfectly-polite-to-us tour guides did not acknowledge or greet any of the staff who crossed our path.
Tad Roach is quite articulate on these issues, but many schools and headmasters similarly express and live by these values. Agree a bit with @Center. There is a tad of condescension in Tad’s words such as “many private secondary schools have forgotten the public spirit and mission…”.
A little OT, but anyone who thinks that science is somehow about “facts” should read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” It was actually required reading for many high school kids way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was in high school.
It takes a long time for people to absorb knowledge. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth with remarkable precision 2200 years ago, although for various reasons having to do with orthodoxy and ideology, flat earth theories predominated for quite a lot longer!
Perceptive people recognize that there are many orthodoxies at work all the time. And that, as moderns, we are not exempt from this phenomenon, which is universally observed at all times and in all cultures. Kuhn would have had a field day with modern climate “science,” which is really more sociological movement than reasoned, scientific inquiry.
I’ve read Mr Roach’s talks, every one that I could get hold of. Nice words, mostly platitudes. Not a lot of deep thinking there in my opinion. His take on the recent Florida shootings was particularly vapid: https://www.standrews-de.org/about/notes-from-tad.
All that being said, there is no harm in encouraging kindness and service to others. The proof is in the pudding. If it is working for the students and parents at SAS, then more power to him. And them.
I like Tad Roach’s take on the world, his view of the highest and best cause of a secondary school. He has been a North Star for St. Andrews and I wish more schools had Heads like him.
Agree @preppedparent - the following passage from Middlemarch is very relevant… “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
I’m going to send Mr. Roach some material from my other favorite novel–Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” about tilting at windmills for his next speech just to give him some additional options at literature. But despite his singling out his own BS, I think he is on the right track talking about an epic life as one aimed at the greater good.
It saddens me that anyone would disagree with the view that, “Values matter; principles matter; generosity and kindness matter, not only in these hallways but in the world.”
It saddens me that anyone would interpret what was said as disagreeing with the view that “Values matter; principles matter; generosity and kindness matter, not only in these hallways but in the world.” I wont speak for anyone else but I find the incessant proselytizing by well to do liberals/academics about what others should think, feel, accept, reject, like or dislike etc tiresome and intellectually dishonest. Elite academia doesnt live hand to mouth in tiny cramped apartments scrimping and saving, they live in school funded housing on lovely campuses with often ridiculous pay and benefits and talk the talk but rarely walk the walk. They use racial preferences to socially engineer an optically satisfactory campus and lecture those that don’t accept their views as misguided: in other words as lacking in values, unprincipled, stingy and unkind.
