Steward School Educational Philosophy

The Steward School’s Educational Philosophy expresses who we were founded to be, who we are, and who we strive to become. While preparing each child for college and for life requires that we value and celebrate traditional academic achievement and intellectual accomplishment, the discovery and development of each student’s unique talents and passions requires that we gauge the appropriate level of expectation of each student individually. In fact, one might say that Steward’s mission begins, at its most fundamental level, with the individual. The importance of the individual, and treating each individual with the dignity to which he or she is entitled, is a theme that runs very deep in the Steward mission. We have two basic duties to each of our students: One is the duty to find in each child what already exists and what potential there is, and to teach each one how to realize that potential. The second, equally important, is the traditional duty to educate the child in what human society knows and expects, and what the child will need to know in order to live in that society, now and in the future.

We celebrate as a positive good the fact that we have a student population of differing talents and abilities. Learning from others, including those whose talents and abilities differ from one’s own, is an essential life skill. Immersing our students, actually and virtually, in a population of students, faculty and staff that is diverse not only in terms of talents and abilities, but also in terms of ethnicity, gender, faith, economics and cultural background, brings a richness, breadth of exposure and life experience that is necessary to a fully rounded education. Understanding and respecting differences, and being enriched by them, rather than threatened, is part of our educational task.

Every institution and community, and especially those dealing with young people, needs to strike a balance between its traditional duty to transmit culture and its responsibility to support the individual’s freedom to explore the limits and potential of oneself, between inculcating the core principles and values of the community or institution and discovering one’s own core principles or values. Steward’s balance between these two tends to lean toward the individual, but not at the expense of others. Particularly is this true with respect to intellectual (as distinguished from behavioral) matters. New ideas, new outlooks, challenges to accepted ideas, new ways of looking at old issues, and minority reports, if well argued, are things we encourage and support.

We have deliberately chosen to limit the size of our teaching sections, the size of our divisions and our overall size. Many of the values that are critical to our philosophy—focus on and development of the individual, intimacy and community, an effective honor system and inclusion and opportunity for participation—flourish best in small settings.

One of the descriptions of Steward at its founding in 1972 was that it would be a place for the “total development of the individual who will not be satisfied with merely fitting into his environment, rather one who will critically analyze it, strive to retain that which has value, and abandon tradition which exists for its own sake. In a highly innovative world, versatility, resourcefulness and adaptability are necessary attributes ....” Although this kind of independence and independent thinking are concepts that are difficult to contain, particularly with young people, Steward nevertheless has a vigorous commitment to preparing our students for new ways of thinking and innovations in the way we approach issues, the way we value each other, and in the ways that we relate. Steward encourages not only the learning of traditional knowledge and critical thinking, but of non-traditional, outside-the-box questioning and skeptical learning behaviors. Our students should feel secure enough and should be instilled with the courage to risk, to explore alternatives to convention, and to respectfully disagree, even with teachers and others in positions of power. One of our greatest challenges will be to imagine what one will need to know, and how one needs to be prepared to learn it, at mid-Twenty-First Century. Virtually all of our students will be alive and productive then; it is likely that some of them will see the Twenty-Second. With the pace of change that is likely to prevail in the coming years, merely being a “college preparatory school” in the sense that that term was used in the Twentieth Century will not be enough.

Variously called globalization, globalism or the shrinking planet, it is overwhelmingly clear that changes in human society, changes that are economic, cultural and, increasingly, educational, will not only continue to happen, they will happen at an ever-increasing velocity. Genuine understanding of other cultures, their histories, and how members of different cultures think and view the world, especially when those views conflict with our own may become more important than traditional learning as we now know it. This need has become especially clear in the case of understanding of religious views other than our own, not just superficially with respect to beliefs and customs, but how they affect logic, or science, or human relationships. Learning with and from others, who are different from us, is an essential life skill, one of the skills that being truly educated requires us to have, and is critical to building a global society.

Advances in technology have created opportunities to educate, communicate, and relate that will continue to fundamentally transform our culture. The integration of technology into learning is essential to student growth and development. Its integration throughout the curriculum emphasizes its importance and mirrors how technology impacts numerous facets of our lives. Technology has afforded students additional opportunities for learning, processing, expanding upon, and expressing what they have learned in academics, the arts, and athletics. Technology is a tool that can make instruction more engaging for the students and more applicable to what they will experience in the real world. Teachers may also utilize technology to help them differentiate instruction. The Virtual or remote instruction, interaction and collaboration, whether in geography or time, is becoming commonplace, even typical, and to prepare our students to function in college and the world, we need to provide, model, train, and use technology in ways that ensure that students will have those skills. At The Steward School, technology is focused on the needs of our students, driven by our teachers, and supported by IT. These are fundamental skills which will be required in the Twenty-First Century, and ones which we must begin working into our curriculum now, not later.

The essence of The Steward School’s culture is rooted in the ethic of care, from which the school takes its name—care for oneself, for others, for the School community, and for a cause larger than oneself, extending far beyond the boundary of the School to the communities, even the virtual communities, in which we live. The concept of stewardship also includes a sense of responsiveness to challenges, a sense of responsibility to oneself and perhaps most importantly, a sense of honor. In order to be a respected thinker and citizen, one must operate from a set of core principles—moral principles—that one observes and adheres to even when no one is looking. Living in a caring, honorable, responsible and fully engaged way results in living life in a meaningful way, itself an important skill, regardless of whether one “wins” or “loses,” although we are aware that competition plays an important role in schools, in American culture generally, and in the global marketplace.

Competition exists and is important at Steward, as it is in college and life; we elect students to this and that, and we select students for this and that, and we use bell curves and calculate grade point averages. We keep score in the classroom and on the playing field. These are not simply matters of achievement, but of one student competing against another, or against some standard of excellence. We do not shrink from competition, but we also evaluate effort and attitude. We know that a team that wins the championship, but has not improved, individually or collectively, or has not been respectful of their opponents’ efforts, has not been successful in the terms that we value most. In a narrow competitive culture, there is the danger of confusing self worth and achievement. Achievement is not necessarily a credit to an undeserving person, and one may justly have a deep sense of worth and a deep commitment to learning and doing, without necessarily being “best” or even “better” relative to others or norms, but by having dedicated one’s self to becoming fully engaged in sincerely pursuing one’s personal best.

Students today feel the pressure of demands generated by their own self-imposed expectations and by the expectations of others, including parents, peers and the School’s faculty and curriculum, and are often faced with having more to do each day than can be reasonably done, with having more interests than time or energy to pursue them, and with the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) message to achieve at any cost. The most basic education that this school can offer is teaching how to lead a healthy life within principled and reasonable limits. At Steward, the faculty and staff are dedicated to gauging expectations for each student individually. Students are guided to respond in healthy, positive ways to the pressure of meeting demands. This process is a fine art: If demands are too great, students will suffer from too much pressure and too little possibility of reward; if students receive too much support, they will become dependent on others rather than themselves. Finding this balance—between stretching and challenging students to meet deadlines and be accountable, but without imposing a program and culture that assumes all of our students’ shoes are the same size—is an all-day, every-day job, and is at the heart of our mission.

In this and virtually every other aspect of the Steward philosophy, balance is a core value. Virtually every school recognizes the importance of balance in one way or another, but it is critically important to, and perhaps even the essence of, Steward. It is as important as traditional academic accomplishment. It is taught, and is accepted and recognized, as an independent value.

The Steward School is about the individual person, the whole person, and the person in relationship to human society and the world in which we live. To the extent we discover the individual, recognize and honor all facets of that individual, and help him or her form a self-respecting, yet meaningful and rewarding, relationship with the world, we will have succeeded.