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| on the mountain Summer/Fall 2012
so many other schools of its size wrestle with: small endow-
ment, facility improvements, enrollment, balancing the budget,
sustainability…that’s the key word, sustainability. Are small,
independent boarding schools that were never able to estab-
lish the sizable endowments that larger schools were able to,
sustainable today? Do they have a hope of success as the market
is shrinking for boarding schools in the United States? Smaller
schools are either having to dig deeper and deeper into the
applicant pool or try new things to hook students. What Storm
King did was one of the most common things, but it can also
be the most dangerous: reaching out to different groups. You
look at the proven markets, and you start developing programs
for them. But when you start doing that, and you develop this
program for this group of kids, and that program for that group
of kids, what ends up happening is that many times the schools
lose their sense of self. They lose their alumni; they lose their
identity because they try to be everything to everyone and end
up instead being nothing to anybody anymore. There’s no core
that holds it all together.
But what I sensed here was that, although SKS had done
the same thing, they held onto their core. And I thought that
thing that still held everything together was the faculty, to be
frank. I sensed with the faculty a comfort with what the School
was doing, based on a central guiding principle: This School is
going to be devoted to helping each individual child succeed to
the best of his or her ability regardless of their starting point.
Yes, there are standards, and yes, we are not for everyone. But
by the same token, the School is more focused on the individual
accomplishment, taking students from point A to point B and
beyond, than it is in meeting some arbitrary standard. That’s
the core.
Have any of your perceptions changed now that you’ve been
on campus a few weeks?
They haven’t, and I feel very fortunate that they haven’t! Usually
surprises this early are not good ones! (Laughs) But everything
I’ve discovered has validated either what I have been told or
what I initially perceived. So I’ve been pleasantly surprised by
the lack of surprise.
In a meeting we had this morning about the School’s
upcoming iPad program, you spoke of the need to make
sure that SKS students are taught about the limits of
technology as well as its assets. Could you expand on that a
little?
I’m very suspicious of anything that people see as a silver
bullet. I hate simple answers to complicated questions, and we
live in a culture that is always driving towards the simplistic,
dumbed down version of reality. And technology is a great tool,
but there have been a lot of wonderful
scholars and great thinkers who have done
exceptional work that changed the world
that never even heard of a computer. It’s
a tool. It’s a tool that allows people to do
more, but it’s a tool that has downsides
built into it that very few people really
understand. It encourages quick commu-
nications, which discourages thoughtful
and deep communications. It encourages
kids to be multi-tasking all of the time
which discourages them from focusing
on one thing at a time, which is required
for thoughtful scholarship. Yes, there are
21
st century skills the kids need to learn
and computers can make the process of
acquiring those skills easier. But that’s not
all there is.
We have to understand that everything
has a trade off, there’s no free lunch, and
the kids must understand that balance is
required in their lives, in all of our lives, in
order to be thoughtful, productive, global
citizens.
Technology is a piece of that. I remem-
ber 15 years ago giving a speech to alums
during Homecoming weekend at the school I was working at
about the dangers of 24 hour Internet access on campus. And it
wasn’t that I was worried that some kids would be downloading
some offensive movies. What I was worried about was that we
weren’t doing enough to teach kids to discriminate between the
truth and the charlatans online. It’s too easy to put absolutely
untruthful information on the web and make it look real. And
it’s too easy for kids, whose discrimination skills haven’t been
fully developed yet, to simply accept it as fact. In the old world,
there was a publishing business that stood between charlatans
Paul and Dale Domingue in front of Spy Rock.
