The Commons, the NAES blog, provides timely—sometimes tough—questions and insights directly from Episcopal school leaders on leadership, governance, Episcopal identity, community life, and myriad other issues.
The views expressed in these blog posts reflect the perspectives of individual authors and may not represent the views of NAES.
The work of helping children grow up is sacred.
The truth of a statement like this can’t be measured. Instead, I come to know it through experience at every stage of my life. To write honestly as an alumnus of an Episcopal school, who now teaches in an Episcopal school, and who sends his children to an Episcopal school, I have to include all three. I can’t separate them anymore.
I attended The Episcopal Academy (Newtown Square, PA) for high school from 2000 to 2004, and those four years transformed me. It was not just that I received a good education, though I did. Those years showed me what education, at its best, is capable of doing: taking the raw, tender material of youth, all that wonder and yearning and confusion and possibility, and slowly and deliberately shaping it into wisdom. That happened because my teachers knew me, just as my colleagues and I know our students now. That sort of attention changed the trajectory of my life and is still shaping my family today. Even then, as a teenager, I knew I wanted to return someday to that kind of work.
The work I wanted to return to was formation.
Every good school has teachers who know their students, and I will not pretend that Episcopal schools have a monopoly on relational teaching. From my vantage point, though, what sets an Episcopal school apart is not merely that teachers know their students, but why they know them. They know them because the school treats formation as the point of education, not a byproduct of it. Growing up is the hardest thing a person ever does. The work is too important to be reduced to job training, and too human to be measured only by outcomes. Children do not need credentials so much as they need witnesses. They need adults who know them, who put difficulty in their path on purpose and stand beside them while they meet it.
The work of forming young people requires the one resource that can’t be faked: time.
Time for teachers to ask real questions and wait for real answers.
Time to challenge students to go deeper into meaning and purpose.
Time to notice when they do, and celebrate them.
Time to notice when they don’t, and nudge them.
Time for students to be seen not only for what they produce, but for who they are becoming.
As a student, I was given those hours. As a teacher, I am given them still. I have room in my day to pour myself into the people in front of me. And now, as a parent, I want that same kind of attention for my children. I want them to grow up in a school that understands childhood not as a race toward achievement, but as a sacred season of formation.
Episcopal education is rooted in a conviction about what education is for, and the life of the school is built around that conviction. It runs deeper than doctrine, deeper than chapel or hymns for their own sake. When we nurture young people, when we see them clearly, when we invite them into academics built around community, genuine curiosity, and challenge, we are doing something that matters in a way that transcends grades and rankings. And that is a school worth belonging to.
Michael Sheehan is Religion Department Chair at Episcopal Academy in Newtown Square, PA—a school he also attended as a student from 2000 to 2004.