The SPS approach to the humanities--how common?

Prep School Admissions
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In “Privilege: The Making of a Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,” Shamus Rahman Khan describes the three-year Humanities sequence at SPS and comments on what he terms “the St. Paul’s philosophy.” Here is some of what he says:

‘This program, significantly, does not teach students to know “things.” The emphasis is not on memorizing historical events, for example. Instead it is on cultivating “habits of mind,” which encourage a particular way of relating both to the world and to each other.’ (154)

In fact, Khan mentions that St. Paul’s does not put much store in the notion of “right” answers.

‘The emphasis of the St. Paul’s curriculum is not on “what you know” but on “how you know it.” Teaching ways of knowing rather than teaching the facts themselves, St. Paul’s is able to endow its students with marks of the elite–ways of thinking or relating to the world–that ultimately help make up privilege.’ (158)

So far, so good. I wish only that he had more fully explained what he means by “how you know it” and “ways of knowing.”

‘Such a vision of the world allows for a felicity of reference to the Western world, a kind of comfort with big ideas. Just as the students cultivate an ease, as we have seen, in how they present themselves and perform their roles, so too do the teachers cultivate in students an ease in how they think. Students at St. Paul’s learn to “think big,” as if it is the most natural thing in the world.’ (159)

Accordingly, Marx’s Communist Manifesto is on the reading list. Yes, society’s future leaders should be conversant with a broad range of subjects and perspectives.

‘The consequences of the St. Paul’s philosophy can be seen all over campus, evident even in how students carry themselves. Students have the sense that they could do it. The world is a space to be navigated and negotiated, not a set of arrangements or a list of rules that are imposed upon you. The students are taught that they are special, and they begin to realize this specialness. This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy–thinking everything is possible just might make it so.’ (161)

I like this. I know from experience that not all schools will do this for their students, sadly.

The kicker is that most St. Paul’s students apparently do as little work as possible! Khan reports that he seldom saw students doing homework in the evening–or even reading, if you can believe it. In addition, most of the best students employed short cuts such as Wikipedia and SparkNotes at every opportunity. It was generally recognized that to not employ these shortcuts, to actually do the assigned readings, was to court disaster. Time and again, the students who didn’t take the short-cut approach received lower grades than those who did.

Yet, paradoxically, both SPS students and faculty share the belief that the students are hard-working and disciplined. Khan explains that,

‘[t]he simplest way this happens is through the practices of “busyness”–walking around campus, meeting with friends, going to group meetings. These busy practices are certainly a kind of work. They are about building and maintaining relationships, involving oneself in groups, and developing a distinctive personal character. But they are not about sitting at a desk, performing tasks. They are far closer to the practices of management (both of the self and of relationships) than they are of classic scholastic activity.’ (179)

I should add that I recently spoke to someone who taught math at SPS briefly, and I was assured that students do work very hard at their studies. Moreover, in this teacher’s class, at least, there were indeed right answers.

I have to wonder if the approach SPS takes with the humanities may lack a certain substance or depth in the estimation of STEM students and future academics. In any case, it would appear to confer distinct advantages for many students–and particularly for those who aspire to organizational leadership positions. As Khan points out, SPS grads do not have the highest SAT scores, nor are they the best-performing college students. Yet they apparently go on to make the most money.

I am curious to know if St. Paul’s’ peer schools have taken a similar approach. Or are they relatively more devoted to “classic scholastic activity”? Similarly, do peer schools see their key role as molding elite leaders? Or, rather, do they lean toward developing elite scholars? Are the students at peer schools engaged in the “practices of busyness,” as Khan describes it, or are they primarily “sitting at a desk, performing tasks”?

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I suppose that I shouldn’t be too surprised that I haven’t received any answers to the questions I’ve posed in my original post. These are difficult matters to to get a handle on. And Khan, after all, is a professional sociologist who spent an entire year teaching at SPS. He brings specialized skills (and a distinct ideological perspective) to his analysis that few peer school students or parents would have at their disposal.

Actually, this is part of a larger question I am forever trying to answer for myself: what should an education do? Or, to put it another way, what constitutes a good education?

Now, I distinguish between STEM curricula and the humanities/liberal arts. STEM are cumulative sequences, with the content of each course building on the knowledge acquired in prior courses. For example, one is obliged to take Intro. to Chem. before taking Organic Chem. But with the humanities (e.g., literature, history, philosophy), the emphasis seems to be more on developing the analytical and critical faculties, with specific content taking a back seat (at least, it would seem so at SPS). For the purposes of this post, I am dealing only with the humanities/liberal arts.

To extend the analysis, I often hear of school and college curricula described as “challenging” or “demanding.” I suppose that means that a lot of work is assigned to students. Or maybe it means that it’s hard to get an “A.” But is hard the same thing as good? Teachers can make a course as hard as they want, but have they necessarily made it better by doing so? Of course, everyone wants his high schooler to be well-prepared for the future. My only question is whether that goal is met simply by making a high school course challenging or demanding.

And I suppose one could argue that schools should always seek to mold the sort of student who is willing to labor and sweat in pursuit of an academic goal. But, then, does an arduous regimen really make for a for a more subtle thinker, a more discerning critic, or ultimately, for a better, more engaged citizen who leads a more fulfilling life? Or does it really only make for a more valuable future employee, a tireless, uncomplaining, nose-to-grindstone type? Must school be an exhausting, health-threatening experience to be of value? That some individuals these days are seemingly willing to do most anything for a good grade–including sacrificing sleep and taking someone else’s Ritalin–gives me pause, to say the least.

American education is continually criticized for having low standards. Somehow, our schools are forever failing us, according to the conventional wisdom. But are they really that bad? Are teachers really not driving students hard enough or holding them to high enough standards? Personally, I’ve never felt that America suffers from any lack of capable, well-trained, hard-working citizens. Rather, it suffers from a lack of people who are able to see the “big picture.” These people can ably locate all the dots–they just can’t connect them. If our system of education is evaluated on that score, then, yes, I’d say that America is doing a terrible job of educating it’s young people.

To the extent that SPS is showing humanities students how to connect the dots by providing them with sophisticated critical and analytical skills, then I would have to believe that the school is on the right path–even if all that wonderful preparation eventuates, in many cases, in little more than a big salary.

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@DonFete, Kahn’s graduating from St. Paul in 1996 does not seem to provide enough expertise on the school’s teaching approach or study habit of student body two decades later. Therefore it seems counterproductive to engage in the discussion unless otherwise the referenced book is somehow shown to be applicable now.
Even if the claims are still valid, it seems Kahn’s observation is on general boarding schools and not specifically limited to St. Paul that he attended, and thus is less helpful in comparing different boarding schools.
Finally, your assumption that your questions were too sophisticated to be answered by the forum readers are baseless and someone might even find it … disturbing. :slight_smile:

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Thank you for your thoughtful comments, jwalche.

Please forgive me. I should have provided more information about Khan and his award-winning book, which was published by Princeton University Press as part of their Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology series.

In fact, Khan returned to SPS to teach humanities about a decade after he graduated, in return for the opportunity to do his research. So, actually, Khan is giving us a look at SPS circa 2006. I would agree that a school can change dramatically in a decade–and even in a year. Yet SPS continues to feature the three-year humanities sequence Khan writes about, and I would expect that many of the same people are still teaching there today. It did cross my mind that the humanities might be taught differently at SPS in 2015 than it was a decade ago–and if that is the case, I assumed someone would state so.

I don’t quite grasp, however, how Khan’s observations are on “general boarding schools and not specifically limited to St. Paul’s.” I can say without qualification that his descriptions of life at SPS could not be more unlike what my DC1 experienced at boarding school. What is the basis for your assertion that Khan’s observations about SPS apply generally to boarding schools? I’d love to hear anything you could contribute on this question.

My expectation was that parents or students at SPS’s peer schools (e.g., HADES, St.Grottlesex, or any other comparable schools) would be able to take Khan’s observations as a starting point, and arrive at a comparison with their own experiences. Indeed, if I thought my questions were “too sophisticated” to be answered by forum participants, I wouldn’t have posed them in my original post.

I do believe, nonetheless, that the specialized analysis Khan brings to bear as a sociologist differs from what we tend to see on this forum. For example, I don’t recall that anyone has dealt specifically with how some boarding schools self-consciously take it upon themselves to mold a privileged elite by means of the way they teach the humanities.

Similarly, for all the talk on this forum of the rigors of elite boarding school education, there seems to be precious little of it on the precise nature of that education. For example, does a given school emphasize “the practices of busyness,” or, rather, “sitting at a desk, performing tasks.” Nor is there much talk of the role that such an education plays in the formation within an individual of what Khan calls “habits of mind.”

Yes, top boarding schools are very demanding, but what does that say about their underlying values and the goals they seek to achieve? Is every top boarding school focussed solely on preparing students to get good grades at the most selective colleges? Khan seems to be saying that by a variety of means, SPS seeks to prepare its students for success not only in college but, more importantly, beyond college.

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I didn’t read the book and don’t plan to read it. I made several assumptions based on Amazon’s book review

He was a student for 4 years and taught only for 1 year. Therefore I assume that the book would represent more of when he was a student than a teacher.

The same crossed my mind. But I didn’t assume someone would state so because curriculum changing in 9 years would be more likely than not.

Reviews of the book suggested that Khan was, as a sociologist, researching how American elite boarding school system hands down privileges to the next generation, using SPS as an example. Also nowhere I saw any mention of comparing SPS with other boarding schools.

I made a conclusion that no boarding schools are focused solely on academics and colleges. Therefore, SPS’s specific way of dealing the issue wasn’t that interesting. It seems Other tops schools all teach what SPS teaches with it’s humanity program. It is logical and matches what I have heard. What I wasn’t, and still am not interested is how each schools program is named or advertised. I think it’s more of adapting educational philosophy that is reflected in regular curriculum such as English and History.

Not when you made the original posting. But it seems you developed that idea by the time you made a following post as saying;

I didn’t pass the discussion because it seemed like a difficult matter. I did it because the conclusion sounded obvious - as that of course other schools care about humanity teachings - and not interesting at the moment.

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Thank you again, jwalche.

What is apparently so obvious to you, is anything but obvious to me. And if I understand your argument, you are suggesting that because a two-paragraph book review didn’t mention any differences between SPS and other schools, such differences don’t exist. Forgive me, but I wish some participants with direct experience of other top boarding schools would confirm your assertions.

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@DonFefe I’m the parent of two kids who graduated from HADES schools recently. Since I’ve never had such intimate experience with the school like Khan either as a student or a teacher, I was hesitating to respond to the questions (great questions btw) you posed. But I suppose it doesn’t hurt to share some of my impressions. My kids’ school has a “3 year humanities program” as well. The 4 year students usually have little flexibility in the sequence of English and History courses for the first 3 years, in contrast to science and language courses where students can be placed in drastically different tracks from day 1. The idea is that the humanities classes focus on the development of students’ critical thinking and writing/presenting abilities instead of acquiring knowledge, and the school seems to believe that a systematic training through English/History 100 through 300 is necessary and can benefit all students coming from different backgrounds.

Our kids’ experience is that they could still be quite busy on a daily basis because of the reading, discussion and writing assignments from these classes. Typically, they’d be asked to read certain books intensively, with A LOT of notes taken. Then they may be asked to make comments on an online forum for the students. They should be ready to have meaningful discussions/debates in classes of “harkness table” style. They are asked to write often, from shorter analysis pieces to formal papers. And the teachers’ review is typically very thorough. Lots of feedback in writing is provided. (I remember for one of my son’s earlier analysis piece, the teacher’s comments were longer than his writing itself).

The training in critical thinking and leadership goes beyond classroom. The abundant co-curricular/extra-curricular activities are effective vehicles for that purpose as well. The school newspaper, debate club, Model UN to name a few involve large number of students. And the discussions on subjects such as race/gender/socioeconomic inequality related to/triggered by what happens on campus in real time are giving students real life context to make an impact.

Interesting thread. Thought provoking.

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@DonFefe, reading the discussions again, now I realize that I have been assuming too much on my side. Perhaps explaining why I assumed so would be both fair and somewhat contribute to the discussion.

While D is not in a boarding school yet, she took English Composition 1A and U.S. History II (Post Civil War - Current) at a local community college this Fall semester. I have been thoroughly shocked by how the curriculum and teaching are so different from when I took those courses.

First, the Composition course didn’t use any test book. Instead it used debates on current issues on Boston Review (.net) as its text book and asked student to choose debates on progressive social and political issues, research on them, discuss on them, and write essays on them. Most of what I thought were cannon of a traditional English 1A course were ignored! It was completely focused on ways of viewing and critically thinking about the society, and how to be part of them and reacting to them. Perhaps it was more as a participant than as a leader like in SPS. But I saw clear changes are being made.

The U.S. History II course was even more so. The professor seemed ultra-left, more left than my taste. I felt like his sole purpose of the course was raising future Sanders advocates. But whether one agrees with his view or not, the teaching was also debating a social issue in a deep, fundamental, and digging into basis of social conflict and movement. It forced student into making own theory and evaluation of historical events such as civil rights movement, domestic policy of Reagan’s vs Johnson’s and Vietnam war, instead of memorizing dates and cannon events. On tests, which were in-class essays he gave more emphasis on how the student develops a clear personal view on an event rather than memorization of facts.

Both courses were completely on essay based, and students were encouraged to make group discussions. Shortcoming of the courses were not in philosophy but in practical matters though. The low paid and busy adjunct professors didn’t have time to individually react with students, and most of the classmates were not trained to join such discussions from their public high schools. D often came home from a student discussion and showed her disappointment of classmates who “don’t seem to care or understand the issues” or peer review comments on her essays that are nothing more than a joke.

Then we studied about boarding schools as D is applying to them now. Curriculum descriptions online, students and parents testimonials on CC, things we heard from informational gatherings and email corresponds all suggest that what DonFefe described about SPS’s humanity education were uniformly being tried by majority of top boarding schools, in one way or the other. I can’t pin point some of them right now. I had dismissed the issue when I was once satisfied enough. More over, ALL top or middle boarding schools seem to have a resource that my D’s community college didn’t have. They have enough students who are serious about becoming a better thinker and willing to participate in discussions, and qualified teachers who can individually guide each student instead of are tasked to grade hundreds of students (and thousand+ essays) each semester.

D loved both courses and is very hopeful to be able to also have meaningful student discussions and more teacher guidance (rather than just meaningful curriculum) on similar humanity/social courses at a boarding school.

So I admit that my first reaction to DonFefe’s OP was a dismissal as it seemed like waste of energy to a too obvious issue. And I am sorry that It was my mistake due to my specific experience and research of this last few months.

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@jwalche You made a good point about how the “SPS approach” can be widely applied in many institutions but the experience and what students can get out of these classes can vary due to class size, quality of peers and teachers etc.

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@panpacific, I also want to point out that the approach seem to be less applied in majority of public high schools, competitive or not. In a competitive public high school in a wealthy district, it seems they are more focused on test scores, busy works, and college admission rate. In a less competitive public high school, well, that’s a sad social issue that the U.S. is facing.

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@DonFefe, other prep schools may or may not teach the humanities in the same way as SPS, but I imagine they all have their methods of helping their students, whatever their backgrounds, feel confident and comfortable among the accomplished, privileged, and powerful. For instance, there probably isn’t anything unusual about how the humanities are taught at Mercersburg, but in their Springboard and MAPS programs, every student has to directly contact and obtain the assistance of an expert outside the school in order to complete a research project. This impressed me, because it makes kids feel they have a right to approach eminent adults. We don’t all grow up with that feeling, believe me. :slight_smile:

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Thank you all so much for your comments.

Overall, I am encouraged by what I read here. I would like to think that all schools are using something like SPS’s approach. I note, nonetheless, Khan’s report of a discussion he had with a recent SPS grad who was enrolled at Harvard. This boy explained, essentially, that every other kid in his American history class knew more about the Civil War than he did–but he alone, by virtue of his humanities training at SPS, was in the best position to tie the material together (or words to that effect). So, could it be that SPS is still doing things, well, slightly differently?

I was particularly struck by Khan’s account of SPS because I knew that my DC1’s boarding school experience was nothing like what he described. In fact, I would characterize DC1’s school (which, by the way, is only rarely mentioned on this forum) as the “anti-SPS,” as it was seemingly doing the opposite of what SPS was doing in virtually every area. Rather than “freedom with responsibility,” DC1 got a cold, authoritarian, punishment-happy environment. Verily, it was a four-year course in regimentation and degradation.

It was always my hope that my children would receive an education that was focused on teaching them how to read and write well, that would enhance their ability to understand challenging texts and make cogent arguments.

But I never felt that four years of memory training was something that would serve their interests. And yet that is primarily what DC1 got. While there was a good amount of classroom discussion, I was stunned by how little writing was assigned at DC1’s school. And when there was an assignment, the comments were often scant and perfunctory.

This was a sink or swim sort of place. If you could give teachers what they were looking for, you were golden. But if you couldn’t even divine what they were looking for–well, that’s your tough luck. I recall my child writing a paper on “The Great Gatsby” that was in some way wanting; when my child asked how to make it better, the teacher could not even offer a suggestion other than to say “there isn’t enough of you in this paper.”

Now, what does that mean? My child then asked the logical follow-up–how can I put in more me?–and received an answer so vague and impressionistic as to be incomprehensible. Imagine a student who desperately wants to learn to write, yet who has to rely for guidance on a teacher who is incapable of effectively communicating suggestions. And, believe it or not, when I tactfully pointed out that this teacher wasn’t connecting with my child, this teacher mentioned to my child that I was “disgruntled.” This was typical of this school.

What I found most disturbing was that students who struggled academically risked meeting with an undisguised condescension that frequently crossed the line to outright mockery. When, for example, a teacher writes of a student in his end-of-year comments, “I find it unusual that someone who has obviously responded well to the coaching provided in an athletic venue would be so reluctant to try academic approaches that were being suggested in the classroom,” peevish rhetoric has manifestly triumphed over substance. This teacher was seemingly more intent on voicing dissatisfaction and disapproval than on constructively and compassionately addressing a student’s underachievement. He seems to think that the student has given up, when the tone of his comments suggests it’s actually the teacher who has given up on the student.

He might have asked himself, rather, what he could have done differently to bring about a better outcome for this particular student. But that question was never asked. If the teacher’s “one size fits all” approach doesn’t take, there can apparently be only one explanation, namely, the student’s willfulness–as if the kid didn’t want to succeed. In fact, no matter what the issue, the student was always at fault and always to blame. The school was, by definition, infallible, and its response to a student’s struggles was invariably: “so, you’re having a hard time? Well, fix it!” Yet correctly diagnosing and fixing academic difficulties can be challenging even for an experienced teacher–let alone for a fifteen-year-old. When the magic fix doesn’t materialize, the student is essentially viewed as a lost cause, and subtly written off–which can only undermine belief in one’s own ability and promote one’s alienation.

DC1 did not attend one of the HADES or St.Grottlesex schools. While this school may be fairly well-ranked–and aren’t those rankings sort of ridiculous?–DC1’s school always seemed to be operating well behind the pedagogical curve. Unlike the teachers at SPS, who Khan described as deeply and energetically–even single-mindedly–devoted to students (as the famed pelican on the school crest symbolizes), many of the teachers at DC1’s school seemed to aspire to do as little work as possible. Indeed, one teacher confided that excessive time and energy demands at a top-rated school prompted that teacher to move to DC1’s school, where the faculty apparently had it easier.

I’m was particularly struck by Khan’s observation that “[t]he consequences of the St. Paul’s philosophy can be seen all over campus, evident even in how students carry themselves. Students have the sense that they could do it. The world is a space to be navigated and negotiated, not a set of arrangements or a list of rules that are imposed upon you. The students are taught that they are special, and they begin to realize this specialness. This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy–thinking everything is possible just might make it so. (161)”

In contrast, DC1’s school continually put the emphasis on tough love, on growth through failure, on the fortifying value of being told “no”–and learning to live with it. It’s almost as if that school’s motto should be Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” But why does a boarding school have to resemble a boot camp? (In fact, another disappointed parent even characterized it as a prison in comments to one of the school’s deans.) Certainly there should be an element of nurturance in a school’s cultural mix, if not outright, unconditional support for students.

While most adolescents are strong and resilient, and do benefit from being challenged and even pushed at times, they shouldn’t be left to fend for themselves within a hostile environment. It’s hardly to the school’s credit that kids were apt to tell themselves upon graduation that, “wherever I go and whatever I do, it will never be this bad again.”

One teacher who we got close to even confided that the administration is feckless and that faculty morale is low. Truly, this is a sad, stultifying school. What’s saddest of all is that many, many students apparently hate the place.

My child entered as a ninth-grader full of intellectual curiosity and eager to learn. The school effectively destroyed that. DC1 felt deeply discouraged for the better part of three years, until a new teacher arrived, took an interest in my child, and effectively redeemed the entire four-year experience. DC1 enrolled in four half-year electives with that teacher, who characterized his offerings as “college level” courses–but even in those classes that teacher asked for some regurgitation of facts on tests and assigned only one mid-length paper per term.

Thankfully, DC1 is now in college and thriving. DC1 can now barely find the to strength to talk about high school. Indeed, most of the memories of that experience have apparently been repressed.

The moral of the story is that despite what we read every day on this forum–that a child can receive a first-rate education at any one of the top however-many schools–it is, sadly, not the case. Not all schools are the same. Believe it.

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I am very sorry for DC1’s bs experience and glad that he is thriving now. I see where it is coming.

I have a school visit experience to share in this light even though it was about science curriculum there. When we visited Santa Catalina School, a 2nd tier girls-only school in California, we were invited to join a Marine Biology Research class, which is a signatory 3 years long program.

Students were grouped into 3’s, and chose a long-term project of own. The teacher, a Ph.D. worked as a facilitator. The group we joined was reviewing data from a local university’s lab. They joined a professor’s research and has been communicating on their own, and notified (not reported or asked approved of) how the schedule/progress has been made to the teacher. Another group was going to program the school’s state-of-the-art new aquarium’s life support system to collect data in different settings, which would be envy of college students majoring marine biology.

We stayed there for the entire period and talked a lot about their project. The students didn’t seem to be super smart and knowledgeable as some highly gifted young students I met who are studying at unversity science classes, or as I heard would be common a top bs, But they were active leaders taking charge of their own very productive research, and I was sure that my daughter would be thriving in such environment.

Overall it was how my daughter’s Chemistry class at a community college should be like but unfortunately isn’t. I would be very happy if my daughter would be studying there from this Fall, even though she then would have to attend weekly chapels and wear very uncomfortable looking plaid mini skirt that is the schools uniform with reasons beyond my understanding.

Finally, when the teacher told me that the program has been so positive that they are expanding the program to include majority of student body, I could sense the positive change toward this direction.

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I just wanted to add that DC1’s boarding school is no doubt the rare exception. Indeed, DC2 attends a school that is absolutely first-rate: fabulous administration, supportive, committed teachers–with the result, happy kids. In fact, I would not have been so confident of my observations on DC1’s school had we nothing to compare it with.

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@DonFefe, I’d love to know the name of DC1’s school to make sure we don’t inadvertently apply! (PM is fine if you dare not post the name in public).