For over a dozen years, I have been writing a Weekly Meditation to our membership, something I have been gratified to learn has been valued by many people. While the ideas for these meditations have never stopped presenting themselves—as many writers have pointed out, much of writing is about watching and listening—the more challenging aspect has been to live each week with the self-imposed brevity of these meditations. I have tried to cap them at 476 words each. No small task, as often readers have responded to a meditation by expressing the wish that I said more about this or that topic, while I have had to resist my own impulses to explain further what I was trying to say with each meditation. Even more challenging, however, is the weekly process of ending up with an initial draft of 520+ words, then undertaking the arduous process of slimming it down to the requisite length.
Among the things I have learned from that weekly task is that there is a lot we say—be it on paper or in speaking—that can be trimmed down. As Norman Cousins was fond of saying, “Words need to be crafted, not sprayed.” The degree of impact in what we say has a lot to do with the economy of our words, and rare have been those times when, if I really tried, I could not find a way of using fewer words to get to my point, thereby leaving a bit more wiggle room for the reader or listener’s imagination—surely one of our most important goals in communicating with others.
Our propensity for more, not less, words can also be seen in our oral presentations, whether they are done in a classroom, a lecture, or webinar. Over the years I have come to the ironic conclusion that the more someone begins a presentation by saying, “I really hope this will be a conversation,” or, “I hope to leave room for lots of questions,” the more likely it will be that there is little room, at the end, for what the presenter promised. As much as we value interactive modes, or eschew the notion of the “sage on the stage,” we love to speak, to use lots of words, and that expectation, often expressed at the beginning of what will be more words not less from the presenter, turns out merely to be a distant hope, not a guarantee.
Perhaps this says as much about the nature of our culture today than any commentary on those who talk to us. There seems to be a real scarcity of listening in our world today, and human beings come to human interaction with as much—if not more—of a need to be heard as to hear. The classroom presentation, the guest speaking opportunity, the webinar context all allow us a structured opportunity to be heard, to build upon a human yearning as much as to impart knowledge.
Likewise, media experts are quick to point out that, when an individual faces the press, the biggest problem comes not in answering a question, but in our tendency to go beyond the answer and embellish the answer with additional observations. Those embellishments, they tell us, are where we can really get into trouble!
As we toss out more words, rather than less, in the hopes of being heard or read, and thus better understood, we might be facing an emerging reality: “less is more” may not only be a luxury, but a necessity, in our (hopefully) emerging post-pandemic world.
Recently, at our spring board meeting of the Council for American Private Education, we heard some unsettling data about what has become known as “COVID learning loss.” We are beginning to learn, from data collected from a wide variety of sources (all of which are consistent in their findings) just how far behind school students in America currently are, when it comes to reading and math skills, in comparison with pre-pandemic expectations. While private school data seems to be more encouraging when it comes to reading skills, both public and private school students lag behind in what were the math norms before the onslaught of the pandemic.
Already, this is prompting a clarion call for “accelerated learning,” to go beyond mere remedial efforts toward a sustained and intensified focus on developing certain basic academic skills. How that will dovetail with the equally urgent needs of young people for emotional support, due in part to pandemic isolation, remains to be seen. I, for one, cannot help but speculate that the two are deeply intertwined.
Nevertheless, as some observers are warning us, we may be entering into a “less is more” era of education, where, in the interests of accelerated learning, we do a few things really well. While that may, at first, sound encouraging—given how dissipated we have felt as a result of these past two years—it would demand of us a difficult discipline. We would be determining what is most important to our schools educationally, perhaps rolling back some of the things we have so eagerly expanded in our programming and facilities over the past decades. As appealing as a more simplified school program might sound, it would entail bucking an “add on” trend that we have all been a part of in our educational worlds of late. Tough decisions might be looming ahead for all of us.
Recently I was speaking about this “less is more” challenge in our schools to a group, and, in response, many in the audience were quick to emphasize how important instructional programs beyond math and reading were to our schools. Each example, each area of school life and curriculum mentioned, was compelling. It tells me just what a difficult road we might be facing ahead, determining what are the essentials, the “non-negotiables” in our schools’ missions and priorities, in the face of our normative preference for schools to do more and be more.
That task, as well as the other challenges we may be facing in a “less is more, more is less” world, demand not only stamina and courage, but, in my view, a spiritual mindset, one that holds simplicity as a value and focus as a spiritual discipline, particularly in a world all too often distracted or prone to mission creep. That mindset entails a scrutiny of who we are and what is most important to us and to the students we educate, what Katherine Tyler Scott refers to as a type of “depth education.” Theory and data will be of great help to us, but ultimately our task will be one involving mind, heart, and soul.
In the words of the Quaker teacher Thomas Kelly, “Prune and trim we must, but not with ruthless haste and ready pruning knife, until we have reflected upon the tree we trim, the environment it lives in, and the sap of life which feeds it.”
For Episcopal schools, we may well need to be more ruthlessly countercultural, holding to what grounds us while the attention of our culture moves from one thing to another and finds meaning in the accumulation of things to do. As Kelly continues, “A life becomes simplified when dominated by faithfulness to (only) a few concerns. Too many of us have too many irons in the fire. We get distracted by…our interest in a thousand and one good things. (Simplicity is about)…opposition to the hurried, superficial tendencies of our age.”
Readers may, at this juncture, hear me singing a familiar refrain, the belief that Episcopal schools come into this crossroads with a certain advantage. At whatever age level, through various contexts, we are used to raising the question, as T. S. Eliot put it, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?” We will need that asset going into the near future and in dealing with some of the difficult decisions that will surely face us.
The Rev. Daniel R. Heischman, D.D., is Executive Director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools.