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Hatred Will Not Replace Us “We must continue to suggest to our students that the life of the mind, spirit, and community at this school are all about the cultivation of a more broad, inclusive humble view of and engagement with the world.”
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s a school with a distinctly public purpose, St. Andrew’s seeks to graduate men and women who will play leadership roles in the 21st Century’s array of dizzying problems and crises. Without question, one of the essential attributes our students will need and we need as their teachers is an approach to the increasingly fierce, hostile, and ideological debates taking place in the country today. I asked Giselle Furlonge and Terence Gilheany to do some thinking about this issue as we gathered for an administrative retreat this summer, and they framed the opportunity brilliantly as they called for an emphasis and dedication to the art of radical listening. Giselle suggested that radical listening changes the very direction of an institution and a culture. She will have much more to say about that powerful vision on Friday. Today, I want to connect this national problem of polarity, distrust, and divisiveness to the philosophical and practical definitions of proximity Stephen Greenblatt suggests. I want to think about what proximity means in the context of a residential school. I want to think about how our approach to argument, seminar classes, project-based learning, teaching for understanding gives us a paradigm we can use when we work on creating a culture of communication, collaboration, and synthesis among competing worldviews. I want to make the case that inspiring teaching emerges through a full and powerful expression of empathy and human understanding. But first, I want to frame this problem more carefully and specifically. Consider two perspectives on this issue: Writing this summer in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman describes an American crisis of trust and communication: “when a liberal comedian poses with a mock severed head of Donald Trump, when the President’s
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