BUILDING A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY

St. George’s Independent School

Student Connectivity:Three Critical Areas of Focus:

Stronger Academic Performance Due to Higher Level Engagement

More Healthy RisksFewer Unhealthy

RisksMore Happy at SchoolResiliency

Relational TrustAcceptance of

AmbiguityCivic Awareness

and Civic Engagement

A Culture of Connectivity

A Culture of Connectivity

Deerfield has no printed rules and no set penalties, and the headmaster has fired only five boys in 64 years. “For one foolish mistake, a boy should not have a stamp put on him that will be with him for the rest of his life,” he says. “I could show you a list of rules from one school that is thirty pages long. There is no flexibility in a system like that. I’m willing to try a little longer than some of the other people do, provided there is nothing immoral. You can’t have a family of three children without having some problems, so you have problems if you have five hundred. If you make a lot of rules, they never hit the fellow you made them for. Two hours after making a rule, you may want to change it. We have rules here, unwritten ones, but we make exceptions to them more than we enforce them. I always remember what Robert E. Lee said when he was president of Washington College. He said, a boy is more important than any rule. Ninety percent of any group of boys will never get out of line. You must have about ninety percent as a central core. Then the question is: How many of the others can you absorb?”

-John McPhee, The Headmaster

A Culture of Connectivity

“Of all stages of life, adolescence is the most difficult to describe. Any generalization about teenagers immediately calls for an opposite one. Teenagers are maddeningly self-centered, yet capable of impressive feats of altruism. Their attention wanders like a butterfly, yet they can spend hours concentrating on seemingly pointless involvements. They are often lazy and rude, yet, when you least expect it, they can be loving and helpful. This unpredictability is what adolescence is all about. The years between 12-19 are special because they offer a developing person the opportunity to experiment with contrasting life styles, with different selves. Without this period of trials and errors, the adult would grow up to be just a larger copy of the child it had been earlier. If human life is such an exciting mystery, it is to a large extent due to the choices that biology and culture open up during the teenage years.”

-Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi

A Culture of Connectivity

“People teach, but the institutions that people build also teach. We have a profound moral contract with our students. We insist, under the law, that they become thoughtful, informed citizens. We must – for their benefit and ours – model such citizenship. The routines and rituals of a school teach, and teach especially about matters of character.”

-Ted and Nancy Sizer, The Students are Watching

A Culture of Connectivity

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, then it expects what never was and what never will be.”

-Thomas Jefferson

St. George’s Institute for Citizenship