By: Dr. Timothy Quinn

Chief Academic Officer and Dean of Faculty

Though we are mid-way through the fall and enjoying the crisp air and gorgeous foliage, our summer reading as a faculty and a community has stayed with us, informing our decision-making, supporting our practices, and helping us to understand an increasingly complex world.  

This past summer, each faculty member selected a book from the following list:

• The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt
• Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic–And What We Can Do About It, Jennifer Wallace
• Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life, Lara Schwartz
• AI and the Future of Education: Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Priten Shah

The Anxious Generation and Never Enough both speak to toxic elements of the culture in which our students are swimming.  In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt builds a compelling case that rising rates of depression and anxiety in teens are connected to the shift from a “play-based” childhood to a “phone-based” childhood that adolescents have undergone in recent years.  Additionally, Haidt argues that the negative impacts of this shift have been worse for girls than boys. While the book has received some criticism for potentially claiming too much in asserting a causal relationship between phones and a decline, the thing that can’t be argued is the opportunity cost of so much screen time for teens.  No matter how you slice it, more time on screens and social media means less time studying, less time reading, less time outside, and less time socializing and playing with friends.  In short, less time to just be a kid.

In Never Enough, Jennifer Wallace, who recently conducted a webinar for Miss Porter’s families, provides the latest in a series of critiques of the pressures placed on high achieving students.  Though many of these students come from privileged backgrounds, that does not diminish the fact that they are an at-risk group due to the messages they are given, which tell them nothing matters but success, often measured by the prestige of the college you attend and the size of the salary you earn afterward.  In essence, what this tells students is that who they are does not actually matter.  Alternatively, Wallace offers parents and educators guidelines for increasing “mattering” on the part of the children we raise and teach.  

Both The Anxious Generation and Never Enough combine to underscore the importance of our work at Miss Porter’s to prioritize health and wellness and to give students work that matters so that they can feel that they matter.  We cannot control technological development and the messages society sends to our students, but we can work to create an intentional community focused on learning and growth.

One of the skills we are focusing on this year at Miss Porter’s is civil discourse, and Lara Schwartz’s Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life is a perfect text for guiding us in this work.  The book teaches the essential lesson that the purpose of inquiry and learning is not to find ways to prove correct what we already think, but rather to find out what is actually true, regardless of our initial thoughts.  Thus, rather than having debates that result in winners and losers, we should be engaging in collaborative dialogue in which we learn from each other, and hence, everyone is a winner. 

Finally, we selected a text on artificial intelligence – Priten Shah’s AI and the Future of Education – as we believe it is absolutely essential that teachers pay attention to developments in artificial intelligence in terms of the challenges and opportunities they pose for how we conduct school every day as well as for how they are shaping the future our students will be inheriting. There is no doubt that teachers should be using artificial intelligence tools to help them be even more efficient and effective in their work with students in ways that accentuate and free them up to spend more time on the interpersonal elements of the job.  It is a bit more complicated for students, as we both need to find ways (though it is surely difficult) to keep them from using these tools to do their thinking for them, while also teaching them how to use these tools appropriately.  How to get this right will be an ongoing conversation for educators everywhere for a long time to come. 

In addition to our faculty summer reading, we also selected two books as all-community reads.  For these, we chose two of the most acclaimed novels published in the U.S. in recent years – James McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winning, Demon Copperhead. We chose two works of fiction because we believe that empathy is built best through stories, and both books transport us to places, times, and cultures that may be foreign to us.  If we are to come together as a functioning democracy in the U.S. and as nations that can collaborate peacefully to address the world’s pressing problems, then we must work to understand and appreciate people who are different than we are.  No doubt, getting out into the world and interacting with people may be the best way to do it, but reading fiction isn’t far behind, and the summer is always a great time to do it. 

It has been difficult to read much lately, given how busy the fall has been, but we have some fall breaks coming soon, and I just picked up Richard Powers’ new novel Playground, so I know what I will be doing with the weekend!