When you are 14 years old, you shouldn’t know who you are. Sure, you have interests, things you have tried and enjoyed, activities your parents have guided you toward, opportunities that have presented themselves, and areas of your life where you have found success, and, therefore, positive reinforcement. But to truly know who you are? That is not the job of a 14 year old despite what society and social media may tell you.
In October 1971, then new Head of School David Fowler gave an address to the Board of Trustees in Holland Auditorium in which he stated, “Proctor has always been more interested in people and their potential than in test scores…Every student must understand what we stand for, who we are, and why we are doing what we are doing.” From a philosophical perspective, not much has changed over the last 55 years, and we hope you are able to feel that philosophy in action during your Accepted Student Day. You see, when you are a Proctor student, you are embraced for both who you are and challenged to imagine who you could become.
Over the past decade, we have seen a tension between generalization (gaining experience and trying lots of things as a high schooler) and specialization (focusing your efforts on excellence in one area) grow. At high schools across the country, athletes are encouraged to play club sports out of season in order to prepare for college athletics, talented artists are guided toward further developing their area of expertise, and the demand by parents for specialized coaches and instructors grows each year.
We believe the pursuit of passions is a good thing, but we must never allow our focus on one passion to stand in the way of our discovery of another. At Proctor, our work is not about helping you “find your passion”, we actually believe that can be a toxic pursuit of specialization. Instead, we want to help you find your NEXT passion as you navigate adolescence and your high school years. Build a boat in the woodshop, learn to use an anvil in the forge, study forestry in our 2,500 woodlot, learn architectural design, explore how your brain learns in neuroscience. We want you to embrace the excitement of being a novice at something, gain confidence and aptitude, and then find another challenge. That is what the Proctor experience is all about.
Perhaps the societal pendulum of specialization has reached its pinnacle and will soon swing back toward generalization, but we are not holding our breath. This is why we believe Proctor matters and why you choosing Proctor is a statement to those around you. We do not want to conform, and we do not want you to just become another experiment in specialization focused on building your college resume without fully learning how to live. We want you to embrace the pursuit of learning, not merely the pursuit of excellence. We want you to study off-campus, to travel the world, to live with a host family, to experience discomfort and then the self-confidence born of those experiences.
We want you to dig into the “why” of learning, not just the “what”, to be genuinely curious about the content of your classes AND the experiences of your neighbors. We want you to put your phones down and re-learn how to play with your friends, to walk through puddles and rain storms with a smile on your face because you know that life is not always filled with cloudless days. We want you to learn to live, and to live to learn because when you do this, you will be more ready for college and life after high school than you could ever imagine.
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