Selective Innovation
Regarding independent schools—particularly those of the New England prep school variety, which are world-renowned for their sense of “tradition”—I pose the following question. How do independent schools balance their sense of tradition with the supposed freedom they have to innovate as independent bodies? Both tradition and the freedom to innovate, while seemingly conflicting aims, nonetheless play equally important roles as parts of the overall identity associated with the independent school brand.
The challenge of balancing the two aims—hewing to past tradition while innovating in the present—is simply another example of a much larger dilemma, creative and, therefore, existential in scope, involving the negotiation of past with present. This so-called Past-Present Dilemma demands the use of the past as a way to suggest the present without being slave to that same past. As the elemental force governing the creative process in general, the Dilemma certainly applies to the identity formation of any dynamic entity, from individuals to the institutions they serve.
For independent schools, managing this tension between past and present, tradition and innovation, relies upon how schools address an essential question of where to focus the innovation. Innovation may very well exist as part of a school’s tradition, but where the innovation occurs—or doesn’t occur—says a lot about what aspects of the tradition a school believes is worth most in keeping as cherished and protected elements of the brand. That said, independent schools, historically, have been willing to leverage their freedom-to-innovate in realms material and technological, but balk at innovation when it comes to the make-up of their student bodies, not to mention overall social cultures that continue to deny belonging status to the full diversity of their members.
Innovation selectively applied such that it favors certain aspects of school operations over others—in this case, the material over the socio-cultural—is an attempt to resolve the dilemma between past and present by making the latter suggest the former, in essence reversing the orientation of the dilemma in ways that only heavily resourced and powerful institutions can. In other words, where, almost as cosmic law, the dilemma functions with the past inexorably suggesting the present, in the universe of independent schools, the opposite holds true. In the universe of independent schools, the present not only suggests the past, but reinforces it.
For independent schools, selectively applying innovation—that is, actively choosing to apply innovation to the material and technological realms, but not to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion associated with the socio-cultural realm—allows such schools to satisfy their independence, their freedom-to-innovate quotient, while maintaining their traditional identity as mainly white-serving institutions.
