Home > Academics > Upper School > Upper School Philosophy and Structure
Upper School Philosophy and Structure
In a scene from the movie, “Harold & Maude,” Maude, a 60-year-old survivor of the Holocaust, is seen holding a daisy and basking in its beauty, its perfect balance of form and function. The camera pans out to show her sitting in a field of daisies, and she says, “What a travesty of human nature it is when people who are this (she holds up the individual daisy) allow themselves to be treated like this.” She gestures toward the field of daisies. In many ways, the MPH educational philosophy epitomizes Maude’s comparison. The independent school setting affords us the opportunity to celebrate and nurture the expression of individuality in each student.
Rather than championing a proscribed curriculum that is essentially the same for all students, we encourage students to chart a course of learning, helping them find their voice, valuing them as individuals with thoughts, opinions and beliefs all their own. It is with respect for their individuality that we are best able to meet our responsibility to ensure that students see the relevance of their learning within the context of their own lives.
In Upper School, we foster an internal valuing of effort and progress rather than merely an external valuing of product and achievement. The process of sorting, separating, rating and ranking students—to see who’s smartest, who is the most athletic or artistic, who should attend an Ivy League school, who should be homecoming king or queen, who should be valedictorian—compels students to internalize an external appraisal of their abilities and worth. Students begin to see themselves as “A” or “C-” students, made valid by the frequency with which they receive such grades. Such assessment too often defines students, and once defined, their struggle to shed such appraisal, if undertaken at all, is an arduous one. As learners, students form a fixed mindset, in large part because others define their capacity for them, rather than forming it for themselves through struggle and adversity.
The Upper School works to avoid that external labeling of ability. Instead, we help students embrace their full potential by providing students with opportunities to connect powerful experiences within their lives to the learning that they do in school. We help students realize that the struggles they are having in their families play out in the classroom; that their fear of failure, for example, invariably shapes their world and their reactions to opportunities presented to them; that their passionate conviction toward social change has ripple effects in all areas of their lives.
In short, we help them understand that their depth of learning is largely dependent on the extent of their self-awareness. As educators, we are a critical link to that larger perspective. We must help students identify and verbalize the connections in their learning and nurture their freedom to be unique.
