I’m back from my quick trip to Santa Barbara to spend an evening with the trustees and faculty of the Cate School (which is actually in Carpenteria, just up the coast from Santa Barbara). Cate is a century-old private boarding high school. It has 265 students and 63 faculty members, and the most beautiful school location, atop a seaside mesa, that I have ever seen.
The Cate faculty has been reviewing the School’s curriculum, which is currently heavily skewed to Advanced Placement courses. They offer 21 A.P. courses, and this past year 124 students took at least one of the courses, while 110 students took 238 A.P. exams. They do pretty well — 85 percent of the students earned a grade of 3 (on the A.P. scale of 1-5) last year. The faculty surveyed itself to determine whether their curriculum was maximally designed to get their students admitted to the colleges of their choice, to better prepare their students for college work, among other concerns. There was some ambivalence among the teachers: Slightly less than half thought that preparation for the A.P. exam in May should be the main goal of an A.P. course, and slightly more than half thought that the scores received on the A.P. exams should be emphasized. Thirteen of 21 respondents thought that “Cate should consider an alternative program to the A.P. courses we currently offer, but the A.P. teachers also thought that the A.P. curriculum was” thoughtful and well designed” and that the A.P. test “provides a good measure of ability and competence in their discipline.”
The impressive Headmaster, Ben Williams, had asked me to be a “provocateur” for last Friday’s dinner session that opened a three day retreat for his board and the faculty. So I did my best to provoke by suggesting that their A.P. orientation was not necessarily the best way to educate an especially bright group of students who already (by reason of their backgrounds and the prestige of Cate over the years) had very good prospects for admissions to prestigious colleges. I suggested that Cate might well have the luxury to focus less on the admissions prospects of its students than on the educational quality of their four years in residence with a strong faculty. I argued that their goal ought to be to provide the students with the basics of a liberal education that we purport to provide in college, rather than focusing on the content knowledge that A.P. courses provide. I also argued that John Dewey’s emphasis on using experiential practices to prepare students for democratic citizenship might be a guide to the sorts of educational objectives they might develop.
As you can imagine, my talk was followed by some pretty spirited discussion. The biology teacher I sat next to at dinner made it quite clear to me that I knew nothing about science (quite right), and assured me that A.P. biology was precisely the right way to teach biology. Other teachers thanked me for promoting the pedagogical freedom they would love to have in designing their own courses. Trustee-parents wondered if their kids would get into Princeton. But I was struck by the very open and inquiring attitude that everyone displayed. It seems to me that the trustees are encouraging the sort of thoughtful curricular discussions that all schools (at any level) need, and too seldom achieve. I have great hopes for what the Cate teachers might do, and will follow carefully what they do. It would be nice to think that the “Cate attitude” was contagious. But we’ll see . . .
