FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL Dear Frederick Gunn School Community, This has been a roller coaster of a year for our school. Learning has continued amidst the backdrop of millions of deaths globally from COVID-19, a national reckoning with race, justice, politics, and social media culminating in — but not concluding with — the violent attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, and the Derek Chauvin verdict on April 20. Through the resilience of our faculty, students, and families, one of the most disrupted years in the school’s 170-year history has also been a year of progress. It is difficult to reconcile these dynamics. Renaming the school to
An innovative thinker, willing to disrupt the status quo for the sake
embrace our founder clearly and recommitting the school, internally
of a better outcome, flexible, resilient, undeterred by opposition or
and externally, to Frederick Gunn as the embodiment and animating
failure, collaborative, willing to take risks and learn from mistakes
spirit of our mission has catalyzed remarkable progress in a short,
– this is a pretty good definition of an entrepreneur – and we see all
tumultuous period of time. You will read about much of the activity
of these characteristics in Frederick Gunn. Our goal today is both
in the pages to follow, so I want to use this note to articulate how
to be like this as an institution and to develop these habits and skills
Mr. Gunn was an entrepreneur before that became the popular idea
in our students. We are, after all, following the example set by Mr.
it is today.
Gunn when he addressed the teachers convention in Hartford in 1877, saying: “If you aspire to teach and train the young, first set your
Mr. Gunn was an entrepreneurial force for good in his world. While
own heart to school; learn the great lesson of reality; be yourself that
that isn’t a phrase he would have used, it summarizes his life. He was
to which you would train your boys [or students] to be.” We believe
unceasingly active but, as his letters and speeches show, he had both
that equipping our graduates with an entrepreneurial mindset will
a mature interior life and the ability to express it. As anyone who has read “The Master of The Gunnery” knows, his activity had purpose — he wanted to effect change, whether sociopolitical (in the case of slavery, gambling and alcohol); social and communal (as he and Mrs. Gunn actively invited Washingtonians to school arts functions and he organized baseball games on the Green against teams from other
serve them well, not just in a future career, but throughout the course of their education and in their daily lives. We hope to inspire our students to ask: What if? Why not? Is there a better way? If we can accomplish this, we will have lived up to our motto: a good person is always learning.
towns); personal (to the lives of individual students through his novel, formational educational practices); civic (as he participated actively in town debates and organized militia drilling in the lead-up to the Civil War); financial (as he invested in town initiatives as a form of early economic development); and institutional (he started and built a school, after all). Through some combination of all of these traits, he took the school camping in the face of the start of the Civil War. All of this activity was for the good of others and was directed towards his vision of a flourishing, interconnected society — the common good. In all things, Mr. Gunn aimed to equip others to emulate his model, illustrated most clearly by the fact that his earliest alumni carried on the camping tradition in their own contexts such that he is considered the father of camping in America. 2
The Frederick Gunn School Bulletin
Mr. Gunn was an entrepreneurial force for good in his world. While that isn’t a phrase he would have used, it summarizes his life. He was unceasingly active but, as his letters and speeches show, he had both a mature interior life and the ability to express it.
