Last year as I stood in Jefferson’s Monticello, a student with me thought out loud about what he was seeing before him as he eyed Jefferson’s bed from the founding father’s personal library. As we moved from the library to bedroom, he wondered about the ideals that Jefferson espoused. “How do we reconcile the contradictions in Jefferson?” he whispered. This was not about Sally Hemings or the scope and nature of government, but about Jefferson’s debt and the chaos he left behind, affecting those closest to him. The student recalled a class discussion that stemmed from a reading from Henry Bragdon’s and Thomas Eliot’s work, The Bright Constellation. In the reading was made the point that Jefferson changed the word property to happiness, thus, comes our very American aphorism, “in the pursuit of happiness.” The student thought Jefferson’s pursuit of his own happiness brought a catastrophic scene to Monticello, six months after his death, when all was auctioned off and property severed from what remained of the Jefferson family.
The aforementioned work, The Bright Constellation – published by The Independent School Press leaves me with today’s question: what ever happened to The Independent School Press? I am not sure if there are many among us who remember, but there once existed a publisher that brought to independent school classrooms extraordinary academic materials. As a child in the 1960s, and not the garden variety, but one who grew up in an independent school, The Independent School Press was a part of the daily discussions as was the opera of school life.
The authors in The Independent School Press stables were brilliant teachers and well engaged in the happy pursuits of independent school life. Henry Bragdon was a schoolmaster at The Brooks School before moving to Exeter where he retired. Thomas Eliot was not only a U.S. Congressman and Chancellor of Washington University – but taught at Buckingham Browne & Nichols. Others were connected with Choate, Andover and Mount Hermon. One of the most well known was William Kellogg who was a master at St. Paul’s School.
I write this as a history teacher who fondly remembers a number of William Kellogg’s works. When I began to teach in the early 1980s, I was handed an American history textbook and thumbed through the eye candy of boldface text, color photos and ah, the review questions. This was not entirely what I expected as conversations with my department chair circled around “getting through the material.” This threatened to be quite an ordeal when I carried Kellogg, Bragdon and Eliot on one arm, and the latest teacher’s edition from one of the publishing leviathans on the other.
These paperback gems from The Independent School Press, usually about 300 pages, were the ideal drilling rigs to penetrate not only great topics but to reveal the discipline beneath the surface of a survey course. I found that these works invited substantive exchanges based on balanced outlooks in the historiography; it was not merely shaped by relativism. These works were also absent of the politically charged predisposition of committee writing. An old independent school sage once pleaded with us to think and express in paragraphs, and that simply was not invited by connecting the boldface print of a textbook as we “get through the material.” I think a good Saturday Night Live skit should include a dinner party where everyone is conversing by multiple-choice questions – worthy of Jean-Paul Sartre.
In our own happy pursuits comes the annual September waterfall under which I find myself on the issue of textbooks and rising costs. A student showed me her phone that included an “App” with all of the functions of the $100 graphing calculator we instructed our math students to purchase—she found the app for free. Of course, the technically recalcitrant math teacher will dismiss this because “students could cheat.” I have heard stories about teachers who, when offered an iPad to explore and test for classroom use; make the reply, “I’m entirely too busy with all I have to do.” At another school I remember certain purists moving desks in front of SmartBoards in protest of their arrival – Thoreau would be proud. My light in August is my own librarian who stops me in the halls to talk QR codes and a phone app that turns the phone into an interactive remote with the web. We have a Technology Advisory Board made up of our own faculty now thinking of the content that may be crafted and contained in a Kindle, Nook or iPad.
Perhaps a kind of a technological spirit of The Independent School Press is at work, and has been at work for some time. What was it Jefferson said about revolutions and subsequent generations? As more and more teachers utilize a variety of web tools, along with Cloud technology evolving as a viable platform for collaborating and assessing, might we see a more hearty return to independent school practices beyond external forces of The College Board and college admission practices? As independent school leaders, we are lucky not to be saddled with the weight of the bureaucratic mechanisms under which our public school brethren operate. The dual-headedness of a textbook industry conjoined with the geometric expansion of the Advanced Placement conglomerate looms large. The demise of The Independent School Press seems in direct correlation with this national expansion on standards. As one public school peer so aptly expressed to me, “since when did our work become the business of awarding college credits?” It finds me invoking Thomas Paine:
“O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”
Last year I invited Dr. Alf Mapp, Jr. and his lovely wife, Ramona, to join my seminar for lunch. We were lucky; Dr. Mapp, a Jefferson biographer, had retired and was a neighbor of ours. We showed him his work on an iPad that my students used as the primary instrument of instruction (and consumption). He looked at the screen in wonderment, sweeping his work across the screen with slight of finger to and fro. The students then showed off the other materials in the iPad, including materials from The Independent School Press.
A student asked Dr. Mapp, “do you think Thomas Jefferson would have looked favorably on an iPad?” Dr. Mapp didn’t look up, fixed on the iPad he simply and emphatically replied – “oh, yes!” Like Jefferson, we struggle with our own contradictions, and as we say in Virginia, Sic Semper Tyrannis!
[Note from Kevin: info on The Independent School Press can be found here.]
Colley W. Bell, III, is Head of School at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy (PS-12, 800 students) in Suffolk, Virginia. You may reach him at cbell@nsacademy.org.
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