Message from the Head of School

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 embrace our founder clearly and recommitting the school, internally and externally, to Frederick Gunn as the embodiment and animating spirit of our mission has catalyzed remarkable progress in a short, tumultuous period of time. You will read about much of the activity in the pages to follow, so I want to use this note to articulate how Mr. Gunn was an entrepreneur before that became the popular idea it is today.

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. 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 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. An innovative thinker, willing to disrupt the status quo for the sake of a better outcome, flexible, resilient, undeterred by opposition or failure, collaborative, willing to take risks and learn from mistakes – this is a pretty good definition of an entrepreneur – and we see all of these characteristics in Frederick Gunn. Our goal today is both to be like this as an institution and to develop these habits and skills in our students. We are, after all, following the example set by Mr. Gunn when he addressed the teachers convention in Hartford in 1877, saying: “If you aspire to teach and train the young, first set your own heart to school; learn the great lesson of reality; be yourself that to which you would train your boys [or students] to be.” We believe that equipping our graduates with an entrepreneurial mindset will 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.

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.

You will read in these pages how the school seeks today to follow Mr. Gunn’s example in multiple ways. On campus, new and renewed programs are flourishing, including our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives (see page 4), the Center for Citizenship and Just Democracy, Outdoor Programming (see page 22), and the transition from a longstanding Entrepreneurship course into a fully fledged Entrepreneurship Center (see page 16). Most importantly, you’ll see how our current faculty and staff, current students, and our alumni are being entrepreneurial forces for good in the world through so many varied initiatives and activities (including those featured on page 26). Entrepreneurship is closely connected to innovation and improvisation. Watching students, colleagues, and alumni practice these, often with real risk involved, is the most gratifying part of leading The Frederick Gunn School. We have witnessed an incredible amount of activity, in the face of local and global challenges, all with purpose. The world needs all of us to be forces for good and I commend you for the ways that you seek to live up to Mr. Gunn’s standards in your own spheres of influence.

I am grateful to all of you for your support of our school and the many ways in which you have expressed that over the course of this remarkable year. I’ll close with three requests. First, stay in touch — let us know what you are up to. Second, come back to visit — and give us a heads up. Third, read “The Master of The Gunnery.” You think I’m kidding, but it’ll change your life to get to know Frederick Gunn and see him as his earliest alumni did.

Go Gunn!

Peter Becker Head of School