w w w. m a d e i r a . o r g

Nota BeneA newsletter of The Madeira SchoolSeptember 2007

Most years at Opening Convocation I pull out six Madeira tote bags in graduated sizes from

behind the lectern. Returning girls and grown-ups will recognize that I am about to launch into The Book Bag Talk. It has become a back-to-school tradition and an element of my twenty-year legacy, as was establishing opening and closing convocations.

My talk about book bags and backpacks as symbols of the individ-ual hopes and history that each of us brings to school, especially new girls, asks listeners to take two affirmative steps: to leave the baggage of bias at the gate so they can enter this community with hearts and minds open to others, and to trust us to create a school in which they will feel safe enough to reveal their genuine selves.

Like many of you, I have a book bag, an office, and a house overstuffed with books, too many unread, all of them temptations and engaging, if silent, company. Into my summer book bag I tossed Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which three people had given me, bumping it to the top of the pile. In comparing President Lincoln’s war cabinet to our Administrative Team, I wondered if Paul Hager or Braughn Taylor were Salmon P. Chase; perhaps M.A. Mahoney is my William Seward. In addition to two mysteries, I read Dava Sobel’s Longitude, an intriguing

history of scientific inquiry and explora-tion. I acquired many new odd facts about scurvy and sextants and gears replacing pendulums in clocks. Finally, I skimmed Jim Collins’s Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t and enjoyed Gentle-men and Players by Joanne Harris, a fine example of the genre known as prep lit.

The juxtaposition of those last two titles, Good to Great and Gentlemen and Players, highlights the tension between two realities, the corporate and the edu-cational, in the life of an independent school. When Lucy Madeira founded her school one hundred years ago, she was purposely starting a small business to make money to support her mother and siblings. Miss Madeira rented space, arranged renovations, printed adver-tisements, hired Vassar classmates to teach, and appealed to others for their daughters and donations. She installed her mother as head of house.

After two decades of success and her marriage to David Wing, widower of another Vassar friend, father of two and a man of some means from Maine timber interests, she decided to move her school to the country. Together the Wings bought 150 acres of the Greenway property in the 1920s. Mr. Wing built the cabin used now by Inner Quest, and Mrs. Wing began to lay out the Oval. In interviewing architects she continued to make use of her network of connections, like any good business

person, ultimately hiring architect Wal-dron Faulkner. His wife “Bussie” Coon-ley Faulkner had graduated in 1920; his mother-in-law, Queene Ferry Coonley, was another member of the Vassar class of 1896. Her family had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the Avery Coonley School outside Chicago.

David Wing died in 1929. His estate was complicated, and his children inherited some parcels of the Greenway property. Miss Madeira, once again a single woman with no credit rating, incorporated the School soon after and invited Dean Acheson, Eugene Meyer, Charles Robb, and Judge Edward Burl-ing to join the board of directors. (The law firm that Judge Burling founded, Covington & Burling, remains our legal counsel.) School ownership shifted from sole proprietorship to a corporate entity.

It is not clear to me that Miss Ma-deira was the employee of her Board, as I am, since she chaired the Board from 1929 to 1957 (as Miss Maynard would from 1957 to 1962). The only other woman member of the Board besides the Headmistress was the President of

School BooksElisabeth Griffith, PhD, Headmistress

... leave the baggage of bias at the gate so they can enter this community with hearts and minds open to others ...

� S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 7 N o t a B e n e

the Alumnae Association. In 1965, the Board elected Nancy Baxter Skallerup ’42 as its president.

Miss Madeira incorporated her school because she needed funds to expand and move her enterprise. With the stock market crash and bank fail-ures, her board borrowed the needed funds from Yale. Today Madeira is a not-for-profit corporation with 150 full- and part-time employees, a $17 million budget, a $50 million endow-ment, a 376-acre campus, a demanding clientele, a shrinking market share, an aging plant, and some outstanding debt. Even though the School receives no federal or state funding, our business is subject to regulations ranging from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, governing employee benefits and wages, to the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act, covering our environment and effluents, to Fairfax County zoning regulations, limiting our land use and population.

Like Lucy Madeira’s business venture, our task is still to educate girls “to lead lives of their own making …” It is demanding work, requiring layers of expertise, patience, perseverance, passion—and a positive cash flow from tuition, contributions, investment earn-ings, and auxiliary programs.

While Jim Collins’ book addresses the challenges of doing business, novels set in schools remind us of the complex-ity, humor, humanity, and frailty of our undertaking.

If I were a member of the Eng-lish department rather than a history teacher, I would propose a senior elec-tive called “School Ties: The Fiction of Independent Schools.” The reading list would include Good-bye, Mr. Chips, A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, a Dickensian sampler, and Harry Potter. I would exclude Prep, which I found

overrated but brilliant in its pink and green belted cover art, and add Black Ice (making an exception for memoir), The Fall of Rome, and the recently published Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.

The list of choices is lengthy, as a bibliographic search proves: Tom Brown’s School Days, The Rector of Justin, All Loves Excelling, The Headmaster’s Papers, Academy X, Saving Miss Oliver’s, The Headmistress … Would Gossip Girls count? The syllabus for a course on this topic taught at Bowdoin College is fifteen pages, and one might be tempted to add movies: Dead Poets Society, School Ties. A recent New York Times book review lamented that the narrow genre of prep lit was overwritten and observed that the number of first novels in this category suggested high unemployment among the recent ranks of independent school graduates.

Madeira girls might not immediate-ly relate to their fictional counterparts, enrolled at St. Oswald’s, St. Galway’s, or St. Grottlesex, who are predominately male. I understand the difficulty. Almost all the fictional heads of school are men, like most heads of independent schools counted by the National Association of Independent Schools.

Male or female, school heads are typically cruel and hateful characters. Dickens’s Wackford Squeers (Nicho-las Nickleby), the vulgar, conceited, ignorant schoolmaster of Dotheboys Hall, starves his students and steals their clothes and money. Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull (Matilda), a former Olympic hammer thrower, pitches recalcitrant children like Frisbees out of second-story windows. In Gentle-men and Players, “The Old Head was foul-tempered, overbearing, rude and opinionated; exactly what I enjoy most in a Headmaster,” observes a senior master. “The New Head is brittle, el-egant and slightly sinister.” The kindly nun/headmistress Miss Clavell in the Madeline series for children and Rue Shaw, protagonist of Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon, are exceptions.

Contemporary settings are coed, with girls as appealing or venal as the

boys. In early works of prep lit, plots revolve around boys and masters, an honorific with a double meaning. In that era parents were physically absent. In modern school fiction, parents are haughty, neglectful, ambitious, and psychologically absent. In the subset of prep lit called admissions lit, works like Academy X and Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death and the SATs, parents are villains, vicious and corrupt.

Every genre has its clichés. The most honorable and effective characters in prep lit are typically the head’s assistant (with the exception of the woman hav-ing an affair with her boss’s husband) and the Latin teacher (with the excep-tion of The Fall of Rome).

Among my favorites in this genre is Saying Grace, which the entire School staff read several summers ago and which I give to all new Board members. It captures the reality of change as a daily element in school life, foreshad-owed by its first sentence: “It was two days before the opening of school when the Spanish teacher dropped dead.” The book captures the pace and problems of daily life: the controversy over the de-sign of the holiday pageant, the conflict between the third grade teacher and the maintenance department over bird feed-ers, the alcoholic art teacher, and the power of the carpool caucus.

So what do books about corpora-tions and novels about schools have in common? The novels are more fun to read. They can be charming, funny, insightful, and on occasion inspir-ing. They appeal to me because they are rooted in human frailty and they reiterate the lesson that the success of a school depends on relationships,

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Like Lucy Madeira’s business venture, our task is still to educate girls “to lead lives of their own making …”

Let us learn from and about each other so that we will become better teachers and learners.

�T h e M a d e i r a S c h o o l

The Lawrenceville StoriesBy Owen Johnson

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManBy James Joyce

A Separate PeaceBy John Knowles

Special Topics in Calamity PhysicsBy Marisha Pessl

The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’sBy Talbot Baines Reed

Harry Potter seriesBy J. K. Rowling

The Catcher in the RyeBy J. D. Salinger

PrepBy Curtis Sittenfeld

The Fall of RomeBy Martha Southgate

The Prime of Miss Jean BrodieBy Muriel Spark

OliviaBy Dorothy Strachey

The Wives of BathBy Susan Swan

The HeadmistressBy Angela Thirkell

Academy XAndrew Trees

Gossip Girl seriesBy Cecily von Ziegesar

Stand Before Your GodBy Paul Watkins

A Little LearningBy Evelyn Waugh

Enter PsmithBy P. G. Woodhouse

A Good SchoolBy Richard Yates

BooksTea and SympathyBy Robert Anderson

The Rector of JustinBy Louis Auchincloss

The Fourth of JuneBy David Benedictus

All Loves ExcellingBy Josiah Bunting

Lord Dismiss UsBy Michael Campbell

Black IceBy Lorene Cary

Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATsBy Paula Marantz Cohen

MatildaBy Roald Dahl

Saving Miss Oliver’sBy Stephen Davenport

To Serve Them All My DaysBy R. F. Delderfeld

Nicholas NicklebyBy Charles Dickens

Lord of the FliesBy William Golding

BlindnessBy Henry Green

Saying GraceBy Beth Gutcheon

Gentlemen and PlayersBy Joanna Harris

The Headmaster’s PapersBy Richard Hawley

Good-bye, Mr. ChipsBy James Hilton

Tom Brown’s School DaysBy Thomas Hughes

FilmsAbsolution (1978)Another Country (1985)The Browning Version (1951, 1985 TV, 1994)The Chocolate War (1988)Clockwise (1986)Dead Poets Society (1989)Emperor’s Club (2002)Flirting (1991)Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939, 1969, 1984 mini, 2002 TV)Heaven Help Us (1985)If (1968)The Lawrenceville Stories (PBS series)Lord of the Flies (1963, 1990)The Man without a Face (1993)The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969, 1978 PBS)Scent of a Woman (1992)School Ties (1992)A Separate Peace (1973, 2004 TV)Swing Kids (1993)Taps (1981)Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1971 mini, 2005 TV)

Prep School Book and Movie List

The Madeira School8328 Georgetown PikeMcLean, VA 22102-1200www.madeira.org

SEPTEMBER 2007 Nota Bene

between student and teacher, school and parent, school and alumna, teacher and teacher, teacher and head of school. But both the business-oriented books and the academic novels pose the same ques-tion: How do we safeguard and enhance those relationships and the institution that is dependent on them?

By listening, learning, trusting and sharing. As I will admonish girls, I’m asking all of us to unpack your bias and open your minds and hearts, to trust and respect each other and the work we do together. Let us learn from and about each other so that we will become better teachers and learners.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about companies that excel: “Good is the enemy of great … We don’t have

great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for the good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good and that is their main problem.”

Following Collins’ terminology, I would describe Madeira as a good school. I’m not sure how I would define great for us, or if any of us would be comfortable with the process required to move us into that elusive category as described in Collins’ book. Instead I would apply Miss Madeira’s standard of individual excellence and personal best. I challenge us to remain a community of teachers and learners who are always seeking to improve.

Madeira needs to succeed, not to be on some top ten list, but because the

work we do is so significant. I believe we have a responsibility to safeguard single-sex education into the School’s second century, to send Madeira girls who have something to say—not as whiny wimps, but as ethical leaders and alpha women—into the wider world, which needs them.

So let us enter the one hundred and first year of Miss Madeira’s “home and day school for girls” in reflection and celebration, honoring our profession of working with students in an atmosphere of mutual respect, trust, and excellence.

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