Sarah Kidwell: Strategic Communicator

When my son was a freshman in high school he asked for an axe for Christmas. This might have alarmed some parents but since he was a student at Midland School, in Los Olivos California, it made perfect sense. In addition to fulfilling a demanding academic curriculum, Midland students live in cabins, do chores, work on the school's farm, and spend much of their time out-of-doors in a stunningly beautiful place – with no cell phones allowed. The school asked me to write a "parent reflection" for graduation this year, which was held not on the steps of the modest wooden dining hall for the first time in decades, but on a digital platform. In it, I argued that a Midland education, with its emphasis on experiential learning and community, makes members of the Class of 2020 uniquely prepared for disrupted expectations and other features of our new world.

"It rained the day I graduated from college. 'So what?' you’re probably thinking. But it felt like a big deal, believe it or not. My university traditionally had a beautiful, outsized graduation on a big lawn in front of a stately and historic stone hall. My classmates and I would be tossing our mortarboards skyward under leafy green trees on a gloriously sunny day, or so we thought. But with a massive storm in the forecast, the administration announced the night before the ceremony that we would be graduating in the gym. My classmates and I were incredibly disappointed.

Doesn’t that sound trivial to all the members of the Class of Covid-19 who are now graduating virtually, at Midland, across the country, and around the world? It sure does. But the sentiment comes from the same place – that feeling of expecting something, knowing just what you want and deserve, and getting something completely different instead. Sometimes it’s a minor disruption, like a change of venue for graduation. Other times it can be huge.

Midland’s Class of 2020 got the huge kind. Just as you were ready to sail through the spring of your senior year and zip right to the finish line – a diploma handed to you on the steps of Stillman in the presence of your fellow students, teachers, and family – you were sent home. Accustomed to meeting daily with your friends, classmates, and faculty perched on wooden benches and surrounded by California oak trees, you assembled on Zoom. What happened to unplugged yet connected? Those classes you once experienced in three-walled buildings took place on your laptop. And what about bossing those underclassmen around on their jobs, a right you earned through years of your own hard work? Midland instructed you to do jobs at home, for your parents. And you had to have meals with them too, and not around wooden tables with your friends and teachers, all enjoying Gloria’s great cooking.

This crisis has been unkind and inconvenient to you in ways both big and small. That’s indisputable. You’ve all been pulled, unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly into a whole new, unexpected and unprecedented world, and way too fast. Such terrible timing! And while I grieve for your lost, last moments at Midland, and for memories unmade, your achievement is undeniable. And most importantly, you’re probably the best-prepared graduates anywhere for this new world.

Whether you started at Midland in September of 2016 or joined along the way, you’ve still had the privilege (and sometimes burden) of graduating from one of the most unusual high schools – anywhere. Most of you started off here somewhat nervously, which is not surprising. Trading the comforts of home and your neighborhood high school for a small, remote, and demanding boarding school is more than unconventional, it’s hard. You willingly chose to live in cabins, chop wood to heat your showers, and balance chores with classes. There just aren’t that many teenagers who would have made that choice.

Paul Squibb started Midland School during the Great Depression. He knew that life could be difficult, and he fashioned a school that would equip students to be prepared for it during the 1930s and beyond. I’ll never forget sitting next to a Midland alum during an Alumni Weekend lunch a few years ago. He told me he loved Midland and held it in the highest regard but remembered being hungry and cold pretty much the whole time. I asked if he ever told his parents about the deprivation he felt, and he said it never even occurred to him, since being at Midland was a privilege. You better believe I didn’t tell him about my rainy college graduation!

I’m guessing that you weren’t hungry or cold for the duration of your Midland years, but I’m sure you struggled at times. Whether it was chopping wood, pulling weeds, mucking stalls, mastering equations, or doing laps* you didn’t think you deserved, you persevered. And when you stick to something, little by little, over and over, it gets easier. Midland has taught you, slowly and incrementally, just how capable and resilient you are. This knowledge will serve you especially well and in unimaginable ways during the oddly uncertain future we face. And whether it’s raining or sunny, or whether you’re standing on the steps of Stillman today or gathering with your family around a computer screen, that is worth celebrating."

*"Laps" are assigned to students who break rules or miss commitments. When the school started in the 1930s, getting laps for a transgression required students to run around a field. These days, laps are usually done in the form of a chore that benefits the community.