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and the public. And the publishing business, one assumed, did
its best at the time to prevent untruths from becoming widely
available as fact. Nothing is perfect and there were plenty of
mistakes, but there was a structure in place. So that when you
went to the library, and you pulled a book off the shelf, you
could assure yourself that it had been vetted by a lot of different
people before you read it. And maybe you didn’t agree with its
premise, maybe its conclusions were erroneous or too bound up
in one particular time, but it had been vetted.
Now you get a kid surfing the Internet and he comes upon
a website that disputes the existence of the Holocaust, and
he reads it and says, “Well, it says right here this never even
happened” and starts developing some vast conspiracy theory.
It’s not just theoretical knee jerk conservatism on my part,
because I’m not a conservative, but it happens. I saw it happen,
first hand. And it scared the
bejesus out of me, and proved
we’re not doing enough to teach
kids to discriminate. Eventually,
a lot of schools figured out that
they needed to do this kind of
education and I think today’s
kids in schools like ours are
being taught how to research
carefully, using the Internet as
an open platform.
So my reticence over the technology isn’t that it can’t be used
to our advantage but because it has the power to be so poorly
used.
You also mentioned in this morning’s meeting that one of
the positive things about the iPad program is that it can
“
lower the drawbridge” for kids who feel shut out of the
learning process. What did you mean by that?
It’s a little like playing guitar. They used to say, “The guitar is the
easiest instrument to pick up and play poorly, but play. And it’s
one of the hardest instruments to learn how to play well.” What
technology can do is help kids experience initial success quickly
because it provides a limited, but pre-packaged experience.
They can get in there and make music quickly, and say, “Look
at this! I can do this!” Now if they use that as an experience to
say, “Well, that’s all there is” and then move on to something
else, it hasn’t helped us. It’s just fed the myth that hard work
isn’t required to succeed. But if it helps kids say, “Gee, that was
fun, I’d like to do that more,” then you kind of back door the
hard work, bring it in gradually, kids will learn despite them-
selves. My thought with that was, we’re in a school here that
focuses a lot of attention on kids who need that first rush of
success. Some of them have probably been told that they’re not
smart enough more than once in their lives, and told that they
won’t succeed, or can’t succeed. Because of who they are. Maybe
someone said, “It’s not your fault, you have this learning differ-
ence, we’re going to work around it” but most kids don’t really
believe that. They believe what their friends told them, which is
that they can’t learn. So, the technology might be able to help
kids to experience that first rush of success, and open the door
to “I can….” Plus it just makes for lighter backpacks!
On another note, can you address the rumor going around
that you used to be a Deadhead?
I have been a musician my entire life. And I think that the
Grateful Dead were a rare and wonderful assembly of creative
like-minded individuals and I loved them, and I loved their
music. I still do! But I like lots of different kinds of music.
What other kinds of music do you enjoy?
I really like folk and acoustic blues. That’s what I play. And
that’s what I’ve been playing since I was 12 years old. They
called it the folk revival. The Newport folk festivals of the early
60
s, that kind of stuff. In fact, we made a pilgrimage on our
way up here. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do was to
go to the Mississippi Delta to see the places where my heroes
were born and lived in very difficult, hard times. So Dale and I
drove through music cities on
our way up here from Arizona.
We drove through Memphis,
Nashville, New Orleans,
through the Mississippi Delta.
My all time musical hero is
a long dead country blues
performer called Mississippi
John Hurt. And we visited his
birthplace, his grave, we went
to the Mississippi John Hurt
Museum, which is basically the sharecroppers shack he used to
live in. They made it a two room museum to his life.
What are you most looking forward to about the beginning
of the school year?
It’s always fun to see the kids arrive. Have everyone on campus,
build the community again. Schools are wonderful and unique
institutions, especially schools like ours, because every year
we get to reinvent ourselves. New community, new kids, new
faculty, fresh start. You don’t get that in the “real world.” It just
goes on and on and on, people cycle in and out, but there’s
never a sense of renewal like you can get in schools. And I think
that sense of renewal is one of the reasons that schools have
such high energy. They come in with this jolt of adrenaline,
and the kids ride that all the way up until Thanksgiving. And
then you have that dark period after the holidays, and I think
everyone at every boarding school I’ve ever seen thinks February
is the worst month in the universe. And then spring happens,
and the weather changes and everyone starts having fun again. I
used to think that was just a northeastern thing, because Febru-
ary is truly hellacious up here. But it was just as bad in Arizona
where it’s sunny all the time! I learned that it has nothing to do
with how cold it is and how dark it is. It has to do with timing.
So to answer your question, I’m really most excited about the
kids arrival, the faculty arrival, the opportunity to build a new
version of SKS that we can all give our best to, look to our past,
admit our mistakes, celebrate our triumphs, it’s a fresh start.
Let’s make it an exciting year!
Paul can be reached at pdomingue@sks.org.
“…
the School is more focused on the
individual accomplishment, taking
students from point A to point B and
beyond, then it is in meeting some
arbitrary standard. That’s the core.”
