Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in the AISGW Winter 2025 newsletter.
I have been thinking lately about stability in times of change. This past January, my brothers and sisters and I gathered in Montana in our family home for the last time. My parents had bought our house in 1970 to accommodate their growing family, and for 54 years it has been home, providing a sense of rootedness and stability as we grew into young adults, left for college, established lives elsewhere, had families of our own. We celebrated graduations, engagements, and weddings there. We brought babies home for the first time to meet their grandparents. It was the scene of various joys and sorrows, all part of a family’s life. Spending time in the house had the poignancy of understanding that we were all leaving a place behind that could not be recaptured.
At the same time, I think we also understood that what my parents had created in that home was still very much present. While we would no longer have the place, we would continue to be a community, moving through the world with the values and sensibilities they had instilled in us. Yes, our actual physical home would no longer be accessible. But the stability and grounding it had provided over the years would continue in a different form — for us as individuals and for us as a family.
Like a home, schools can be the locus of stability for many, especially in turbulent times. Perhaps that is because they are the setting for so much personal development and growth for young people. They are also highly relational in nature and thus tend to be places where people gravitate when they are feeling untethered. But like any institution, they are not immune to change. Long-tenured faculty retire, buildings are renovated and repurposed, leadership changes. So how do we take what these institutions offer at their core and preserve it from generation to generation? And — more importantly — how are we preparing students for the world outside when they leave our doors?
Yes, schools are a physical place, but their effect lives on long after their students graduate. If we have done our work, we send young people out in the world equipped to handle the vicissitudes of life that are thrown at them. And as much as it is comforting for alumni to revisit our campuses, it is the process of who they became while they were within our four walls that matters — so that the touchstone of an actual place, fossilized in time, is not as important as the experiences lived and value shaped there. Schools are cradles where a person’s character is formed, and where one gains a sense of the world one inhabits. Because they are such ‘sacred spaces,’ we as educators are tasked with the important work of stewarding the students’ experience to prepare them for what lies ahead.
We have navigated some rapids in recent years and the water ahead does not look much calmer. Perhaps now is the time, then, to double down on our missions, our values, and our responsibility as educators to prepare this next generation to step into their adulthood prepared for whatever comes next — not only with core educational competencies, but with critical thinking and civil discourse skills and a sense of how to be good citizens and good people.
