Executive Director Pete Upham shares his periodic reflections. 

July 2010

Whence Solitude?

In William Dersiewicz's "Solitude and Leadership," an essay I sent to all of our members earlier this month, the author draws a crucial distinction between the routine power often epitomized by those in the top ranks of corporate, governmental, and educational bureaucracies, and true leadership, characterized by moral courage, and predicated on independent thinking.

Deresiewicz defines thinking as "concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it." Such thinking, he argues, is impossible to achieve through frenetic action or multi-tasking (which under his definition not only prevents thinking but actually retards it). Instead, thinking requires solitude.

As the pace of enterprise accelerates, our schools are not spared. Programs, initiatives, facilities, and services multiply at a dizzying rate, leading inevitably to either ornate mediocrity, or an excellence that entails rising demands on staff, faculty members, and administrators.

Thoreau met the velocity and anxiety of his day by living in the woods. Simplicity and survival were the ground of his solitude—and the fountain of his impressive thinking. Yet most of us, and certainly most of our schools, are not prepared to abandon the Internet, let alone running water, to earn our depths. The answers to our spinning must be stillness found through other means. For individuals, Deresiewicz suggests four forms of fertile solitude: introspection; "the concentration of focused work;" sustained reading; and, somewhat paradoxically, friendship—more specifically, "the deep friendship of intimate conversation." This is Deresiewicz's recipe for true thinking, and by implication, his curriculum for leadership development.

If Deresiewicz's essay has something to offer us as educators, one question arises almost automatically: to what extent are we genuinely encouraging student thinking and leadership? At first blush, our schools are veritable paragons of "focused work." And our students, on paper, read voluminously. On second look, the "focus" of their work, so often subjugated to credits, GPA's, AP requirements, test scores and the like, might not be as singular as we imagine. And reading is harder to sustain when SparkNotes® and search engines promise the quick gist, rather than the labored, layered substance.

Perhaps more fundamentally worrisome is that the nearly reflexive quest at schools for scope and schedule tends to thwart the "intimate conversations" of real friendship. Taken to its extreme, this quest can destroy the very possibility of introspection. If we're not careful, we'll dismantle thinking in the service of learning. And if Deresiewicz is right, we'll send out into the world many smart technocrats, yet correspondingly few leaders.

But what if we were careful? What would we do?

On the one hand, it's fairly simple to develop, and not impossible to implement, temporary remedies for the excesses and distortions of over-scheduling, over-programming, and over-building: establish time for student reflection, time for student friendship. On the other hand, it's exceedingly difficult to maintain the discipline of preserving this "unscheduled" time when our cultivated ambitions for achievement exercise more influence in our schools than we might prefer to acknowledge. New plans, no doubt meritorious, will sooner or later nudge out solitude's necessary space and time. As memory quickly dims, this space and time soon resemble blank sheets of paper, canvasses wasted for their emptiness.

The challenge, then, is not essentially tactical or strategic. The challenge is philosophical. Does solitude—a personal, even existential notion—have meaning in an institution? The short, dispiriting answer is, "No." Yet, fortunately, boarding schools contain the seeds of a more complete and affirmative answer.

More than most educational institutions, boarding schools have a straight-faced claim to the term "community." Boarding schools are communities because we live together in them. This shapes the relationships individuals have with one another—and with their schools—in profound and manifold ways that transcend the pedestrian fact that students and teachers happen to eat and sleep on campus. Witness the frequency with which boarding students call school "their second home," or in many cases, just "home."

Admittedly, our communities are peculiar and partly synthetic, in that they were constituted for express ends (preparing students for university). In this sense, a boarding school has more in common with a seminary—or West Point—than with a typical village. Yet these express ends of a school, codified in the mission statement, serve as one important touchstone for our work and lives together.

Still, almost all schools, boarding and day, have mission statements. We know they can serve as justification for just the sort of solitude-killing advances institutions are predisposed to pursue. Arguably, a boarding school's very comprehensiveness inflates this predisposition, this desire to program, systematize, and bureaucratize everything, thus fattening the institution, the weight of its machinery pressed with graduating force on the very people the school is intended to serve.

So what checks this impulse? What's special about boarding schools that makes possible shielding the common welfare of students and faculty— their introspection, work, reading, and friendship—from the institution's own amoral and impersonal appetites?

In a boarding school's community life, one discovers a roughly complete, if always provisional and evolving, view of the human person. Because school takes place throughout the day (and night), and the boundaries between "school" and "life," "campus" and "home," "student" and "person" are intentionally confused, a boarding school serves as a laboratory of its own lessons. The culture of the school amounts to an unofficial anthropology—never written down, but as clearly legible as the mission statement and strategic plan. The community's rules, regulations, and history—and perhaps more powerfully, its practices, traditions, and idiosyncrasies—communicate a visible, living reminder of what's real, what's important, and what's right. Boarding schools answer "what does it mean to be human?" by living the question every day. With more or less success, a boarding school's sincere focus on the "whole child,"—psychological, spiritual, social, intellectual, and physical— and the school's pervasive milieu of relationships, mitigate the will to overbearing totality. The essentially moral vision at the heart of our life together can govern our ambitions for power and perfection. The community can discipline the institution.

Can, not does. These fruits are possible at boarding school, not pre-ordained. Yet with more time—and different kinds of time—than is available to other schools, a boarding school offers its heads and thinkers the unique opportunity of not only creating space for solitude, but of seeing and hearing constant reminders of why it's important enough to protect. If we plan to educate real leaders, we will.

Until next time, Pete

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