From the Director’s Chair September 2008
Posted by msnl in : From the Director's Chair, September 2008 , trackback“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Mother Teresa
This year we explore the theme of peace at Penn Charter. It’s a rich topic, grounded in our Quaker heritage and relevant to our world and our times. It’s also, for better or worse, a topic which lends itself to oversimplification: peace as “the opposite of war,” or “the absence of conflict.” I know I’m guilty of sometimes dismissing peace as a cliché, but there’s more to it: it’s the possibility of listening first, then talking; it’s the feeling of being able to wait, rather than act; it’s the ability to consider another’s perspective before presenting my own. It is remembering, as Mother Teresa said, “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
As we who live and work with teenagers know, adolescents have a wonderfully keen sense of justice and equity. This sense is a key part of growing up and understanding the world, and it ranges from simple questions such as who gets more pizza, to social and political situations with increasing complexity. When we in Middle School work with young people, we help them to move from the concrete examples of equity to examples that are more complicated and nuanced. This learning matches students’ maturation process, and gives them the tools to begin understanding a complicated world on their own terms, with their own resources.
In our study of peace in Middle School this year, we strive to approach peace – a complicated topic – with the same kind of learning that helps us to define self and other, fair and unfair. Peace is a big idea – an idea we adults, too, can find overwhelming – and it is our job to help one another explore its meaning in ways which can make it relevant in our lives, here and now.
So, where do we start? We will lift up peace each week, in our own words and our own minds, with a simple study of the things happening in the world around us: current events. As they lead our weekly assembly, our eighth graders will choose a story about peace, picked from the news. We can talk, of course, of conflicts around the world; but we can also talk about Fair Hill Burial Ground, the Quaker cemetery in North Philadelphia fringed by a community which took its streets back from a ravaging drug trade. We can talk about world peacemakers like the extraordinary Nelson Mandela, featured in a Newsweek cover story this July celebrating his 90th birthday. We can find stories of our own heroes, people like Penn Charter parent Elsie Caldwell, who spoke movingly of love’s power over hate, even after her son Kenny (OPC ’ 89) was lost on 9/11.
As the year goes on, who knows what we will find? Can peace be about giving free music lessons to neighborhood kids? Can it be about police efforts to know people in their neighborhoods? I can’t wait to see what other questions our young people will think to ask.
The new year always brings renewed energy and imagination, ideas and questions. I welcome you all to Middle School for this 2008-09 school year, and I invite you to consider, along with all of us at Penn Charter, the meaning of peace.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School
