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From the Head of School Hope and the Songbird

I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post recently with an eye catching title, “We’ll never solve our many crises without this one ingredient …” The author, David Von Drehle, didn’t finish that sentence until the end, but it didn’t really matter because I was captivated by his beginning. His opening line is about a songbird – a cardinal, actually – that appeared at his feeder one early spring day. Songbirds are in decline across the country, for reasons both known and unknown, and Von Drehle was studying that scarlet plumed male with that understanding.

But he didn’t find himself despairing or wondering why he wasn’t seeing more of them. Instead he looked at the bird who flitted about in his stately colors, feeding and posturing with equal zeal, and felt … hope. He is sort of surprised by that sensation, but then he reasons, “If there can be one at my feeder, then there can be more. Let’s see what I can do.”

It’s a posture that is quite familiar to all of us who live and work on this Mesa. Hope is intrinsic to education. That’s a given. But applying hope to problemsolving or crisis management or future planning, that’s a choice. It is easy, these days, to acknowledge the scale of the challenges our world is grappling with and perhaps to become jaded by such knowledge. Every problem can seem bigger than each of us. So thought Mr. Von Drehle. And then that cardinal showed up.

Schools like Cate came into being in large part to separate students from the world so that they might in these small residential communities fashion something better. How else might they go out into the world and improve it?

Our Mesa is no longer as separate from everything around it as it once was. That “bubble” so many have referred to over the years is a highly permeable membrane. And Cate students and faculty are as likely to reach out beyond our Mesa as the forces impacting our world are to reach in. That’s actually the good news.

No education can be fulfilled in isolation. Ideas need to be challenged, theories need to be tested, people need to be informed, and discoveries need to be made. The whole premise of Servons is that which we owe to others. How can that spirit possibly be actualized without reaching beyond our immediate community?

This issue of the Bulletin addresses that very question and captures some of the ways the Cate community grapples with dynamics and difficulties that transcend any one school or place. That doesn’t mean that we have it all figured out. How presumptuous would that be? But we are doing our best to be a part of many narratives. Like that cardinal from Mr. Von Drehle’s essay, we may appear unexpectedly but we are there to join in, to play a part in the grander scheme, and maybe to offer all a little hope.

It’s hard to imagine a better byproduct of a bubble burst.

Servons, Benjamin D. Williams IV

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