Dear Spartanburg Day School Learning Community,

At our opening assembly this week, I asked every person in the gym — 4K through seniors, faculty and staff — to raise a hand if they had asked a computer a question this summer. A phone, a tablet, a laptop, the speaker in the kitchen. Nearly every hand went up. Then I asked them to keep it up if the answer came back in about a second. Almost none went down.

Those machines are remarkable, and they will get better every year your child is a student here. But there is something they have never done. A machine has never woken up in the morning and wondered about anything. It has never wanted to know. It does not care what the answer is. Wondering is ours. Wanting is ours. That is the part that is human, and it is what I want us to build this year.

I told our students about Sylvia Earle. When she was three years old, standing at the edge of the ocean on the New Jersey shore, a wave knocked her flat. She did not decide the ocean was frightening. She decided she had to know what was down there. Forty years later, off the coast of Hawaii, she rode the front of a small submarine twelve hundred and fifty feet straight down, into water so deep no sunlight reaches it — and then unhooked and walked alone on the ocean floor for two and a half hours, in the dark, by the light on her own suit. Nobody had done it before. Nobody has done it since. She is ninety years old, and she is still diving.

A machine could have told Sylvia Earle exactly how deep that water was. It could have calculated the pressure, the temperature, the oxygen, all in one second. No machine on Earth could have made her want to go.

That is what David Brooks calls an explorer's heart, and it is the frame we are carrying into this school year alongside our value of curiosity. I offered our students a working definition, because I think the usual one is too easy: curiosity is not just asking a question. Curiosity is staying with the harder question. A lot of people can ask. Explorers stay at it. For our youngest Griffins, this comes naturally — the child who asks "but why" nine times in a row is not being difficult, and our job is to make sure school never talks them out of it. For our Middle and Upper School students, it gets harder, because there is now always a faster way. Having an explorer's heart at fifteen is a choice: the choice to go the long way on purpose, because the long way is where you actually change.

Every explorer needs a kit, and ours is written down. Our Portrait of a Graduate says Spartanburg Day School students are Purposeful, Confident, and Discerning. At SDS that means: you know why you set out; you will go even when no one has gone ahead of you; and you can tell the difference between a shortcut that helps you and a shortcut that robs you of the trip. Every teacher in that gym has those three words in mind when they plan your child's day.

Which brings me to the sentence you know well. Spartanburg Day School provides a superior educational experience, in a community of trust, that prepares students for a life well lived. Hear it this year as a plan. The superior educational experience is the equipment — the reading, the math, the practice, the craft, the hours. Nobody heads out unprepared. The community of trust is the thing no machine will ever be: your child is not exploring alone, and the adults in this building know their name, know what they are capable of, and will come find them when they get stuck. And a life well lived is the destination. Not a job. A life they would be proud to have gone out and had.

We closed the assembly by ringing the bell that Mrs. Vicky Strange gave to Mrs. Rachel Deems, who rang it each year to call the faculty together on their first day. Three years ago we began ringing it together, as one school, to mark the beginning. Every expedition starts with a signal.

Here is my ask of you at home. When your child says "I don't know" this year, resist handing them the fastest answer — including the one on your phone. Sit in the not-knowing with them for a minute longer than is comfortable. That minute is where the explorer's heart gets built.

Be curious. Stay with the hard question. Go the long way on purpose.

Go Griffins!

Sincerely,

Dave Skeen

Head of School