The following is my charge to St. John’s employees during
our in-service week. I usually work from notes alone, but I’ve drafted a prose
version since some people asked for a copy. So the language is not quite the
same as when I speak. It also definitely loses something without the slides, so
maybe you can imagine them. And while you’re doing that, maybe you can conjure
a sense of my delivering the remarks with an Obama-level rhetorical flair.
The picture
you see is Inspiration Point in Yosemite. That seems appropriate given point of
a charge. Plus, if we are going to think about the big picture, this puts it in
perspective. That waterfall you can barely make out is actually just over 2400
feet tall.
Yes, normally I
give you my charge the day before we start; but I decided to do it today for
very particular reasons. You know we have our board retreat tomorrow, and heads
of school know each of us is just one bad board meeting away. Plus I may still
be in jail come Tuesday. No, not the drunk tank; I’m attending the political rally
downtown on Saturday evening, and you never know what could happen. Just as a priest often keeps politics out of
the pulpit, I try to keep them from this podium. But there are times one
shouldn’t keep silent. That’s tied to why I switched to today. Maybe it’s my
own needs right now, and something about this feels a bit self-indulgent. But I
know that some of you feeling the same yin-yang of this week as I am. We have the
exuberance, energy, optimism as we launch into the new school year. Yet we
can’t ignore the larger context of cultural malaise (only way I can describe
it). Inspiration, indeed, is needed; and what I humbly will try to provide.
I’ll do so by talking about why a St. John’s matters so, so much, especially
now.
I’d like to begin by talking about
this guy. Anyone know who he is? I doubt it, but if you do, don’t say. Let me
give you some hints. He was born in 1976 in Arlington, and he later went to went
to St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Austin (a fellow ISAS school), where he was a
near-classmate of my sister-in-law. He then attended SMU, where he became an
entrepreneur, starting the EZ Laundry dry-cleaning service on campus. He moved
to Nashville and started a media company selling billboards for country music,
which was bought by Clear Channel. Off to Los Angeles to start the cable
network Reality Central. All of this by age 30. Obviously a total slacker.. Then
came his second biggest claim to fame—he and sister finished second on The Amazing
Race. Do you know yet? You certainly will by Blake Mycoskie’s greatest feat:
founding Tom’s Shoes.
In case any of you don’t know
Toms, it works this way: you buy a pair, and a pair goes to a needy child
somewhere in the world. It started when Mycoskie was visiting Argentina in
2006, and he met a woman providing shoes for children. He learned of and saw the
effects of being shoeless—blisters, sores, infections, long-term consequences.
Very quickly he decided to start this shoe company, first called Shoes for a
Better Tomorrow; shortened to Toms. He began with very limited resources, and
was quickly overwhelmed by demand after a media story. By 2013, Tom’s had
donated over 10 million pairs. He expanded beyond shoes. In 2011 Tom’s partnered
with Seva Foundation to focus on eyeglasses. Each pair bought led to glasses,
medical treatment, even optical surgery for someone. Then in 2016 Tom’s
Roasters coffee started, with each bag purchased led to week of safe water.
Tom’s has influenced several
others. Schools had Tom’s shoe events for their proms. The students would get
their fancy duds, then buy Tom’s and decorate them to wear to prom. The Falling
Whistles program involved selling whistles to combat civil war in Congo—a
program that became part of the first 8th grade service learning
capstone here at St. John’s. Warby Parker, which is a 1:1 eyeglass program. Method
eco-friendly cleaning products gives part of their profits for environmental clean-up
efforts. Veev, which features acai berries in beverages, donates a dollar for
every bottle sold to rain forest preservation. Feed reusable grocery shopping
bags provide free school lunches needy students. So the ripple effect has been
tremendous.
This summer read Blake Mycoskie’s
book, Start Something That Matters.
At first I was plagued with all sorts of liberal guilt. Yes, I work in
education, which certainly matters. But I thought about the privileged
circumstances in which I’ve always done so. And it’s crucial for me to feel real
purpose and meaning in my life. Meanwhile, the really big takeaway for me was
that if you’re going to do something that matters, need three things. You have
to care deeply. You have to imagine the possibility of better. You have to
muster up the courage to act.
One I stopped wallowing in that
liberal guilt, I started thinking hard about why what we do here at St. John’s
matter. Maybe it’s rationalization, but we’re working with kids who will be in
positions to make a real difference in the world. And that certainly matters.
The ripple effect of Mycoskie’s
makes me think of the rice-chessboard story. The inventor of chess was asked by
emperor what he wanted for his reward. The inventor asked that the emperor put
one grain of sand on first square, and double it on each successive square. The
Emperor quickly agreed, thinking he was getting off easy. Well, you can see
what happened. Halfway through there
were 4,294,967,295 grains of rice, and at the end there were
9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
Here’s the point—take this an analogy. And just as rice was so valuable
back then, what you provide now is priceless. If you have a truly positive
impact on 10 kids this year; then at some point they have positive impact on 10;
then each of those ten… Very quickly you have somehow positively touched 1000
people. It’s not long until that hits a million. And that’s just one year’s
worth of work. Plus—and this is truly awesome--any moment can be the one which makes
that difference.
Why does that happen here so often at St. John’s? There are many, many
reasons; I’ve synthesized them to three.
First, our values. Service, respect, gratitude, connectedness, civility,
empathy—we bring those to the forefront and keep them there. They are our
values as an Episcopal school. We don’t just talk about them; we put them into
action. It’s education with a larger purpose. It’s learning what it means to
lead a noble life. It’s how you foster that; how you model that.
Second, our approach to school—more particularly, our approach to learning.
We see everything as a chance to learn, and to do so joyfully, and to grow
through the process. We recognize that deeper learning involves a double loop.
On the surface, one learns to solve a particular problem. But one is also,
probably more importantly, learning the habits of learning. It’s also inherent
in what we realize meaningful learning is and isn’t. It’s not just knowing
answers; not just study or training. It’s more a cast of mind, an outlook, an
approach to life. It’s not automatic. It requires energy, thought, even bravery.
That’s because real learning is not just finding out what others already know.
It’s discovering for ourselves by questioning, thinking, testing something it
becomes our own.
Third, our approach puts us on the right side of history. You’ve heard me
say many times we have to educate not for our past or present, but for kids’
futures, the world in which they will be living. To do so, have to accept we
live in time of discontinuous change. Discontinuous, not continuous, as it can
often feel because of numerous small changes. But really significant change
happens through what I call the Slinky effect. Forces gather slowly, then burst
forth. This pattern tends to prompt progress more than steady change does
because it demands more extreme questioning, rethinking, and adaptation. Those
are things one can do only if one knows how to learn, and to do it well.
We also are right side of history because of what we do. Think of it this
way. If we were to look back at the 20th century and think about the
most significant events and figures, a logical selection would be World War II.
This would lead us to think of people such as Churchill, Hitler, Stalin,
Roosevelt. But, as important as they were, I could argue they are not really
the most significant. Instead, I’d hold forth people such as Einstein, Freud,
Margaret Mead, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr. Why? They changed the way
the world thinks! They caused us to re-imagine possibilities. And isn’t that
what you do for kids each and every day?
More contemporarily, we live in a time of intense culture wars. We can
assign plenty of blame to all points of the political spectrum and elsewhere,
and we’re masters of finger-pointing. The issues are festering, heightening,
gaping. There is no telling the effect on kids, now and in the long-term. Remember
times like this have happened before and likely will happen again. When they
do, it moves far beyond the political. It becomes ethical, spiritual,
existential. While cultural, it becomes very personal. Right now, it’s gnawing
at me that I taught a founder and now major leader of the alt-right. I wonder
how that gangly, goofy kid became a face of evil. How does that happen?
If we look at our nation’s history, this is not something new. It has manifested
itself in different ways. During one of our first presidential elections,
Jefferson was scorned for owning a Koran. At different times we have feared Mormons
and Catholics. We’ve spewed anger at various immigrant groups, including those
from which many of us are descended. There’s been both overt and unspoken
racism against Latinos, Asians, Blacks; and phobia directed towards members of
the LGBQT+ community and other marginalized groups. Some of this we have
forgotten. What we remember, we can’t believe we engaged in. Some of it lingers,
sometimes in the form of painful scars.
But when we look at that history of our nation, we also should draw hope.
We move forward, individually and collectively. The history of America, for all
its dark moments, is one of gradually greater acceptance and inclusion. That is
how it should be. That is why it’s so crucial that at St. John’ we stress
intellectual analysis, civil discourse, character, and service. Our national history
is one of gradually learning the principles we already know here, capture in our
fifth tenet of Episcopal education, straight from baptismal covenant: respect
the dignity of every human being. In doing so, we respond to hatred, to what and whom we cannot understand with a
Christian type of love. We strive to gain that understanding, some sort of clarity.
We continue that ongoing quest to heal ourselves and the world
Ours is the type of education that will help answer the real question.
It’s not how do we make America great again, but: How do we make America
grateful again? Actually, it goes beyond that. The entire world needs the type
of education that St. John’s aspires to provide. Because all those things I’ve
talked about, those and more, they ultimately do perhaps the most important
thing that people need: it’s an education that plants and nurtures seeds of
love and hope.
