New book coming out: The Connected Parent

Posted on May 25, 2020 by John Palfrey

With my friend and collaborator Urs Gasser, I have a new book coming out this fall — The Connected Parent: An Expert Guide to Parenting in a Digital World. It’s a close cousin of our previous book, Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age. In this new book, we apply the findings from our 15 years or so of studying young people and how they use technology to a book that offers advice to parents raising kids these days.

It’s always fun to anticipate the arrival of a new book! It comes out in October, 2020. In the meantime, join our Facebook community.

Head of School Bookshelf, 2016-2017 edition (combined)

Posted on August 27, 2017 by John Palfrey

Last academic year I kept up my tradition of putting out free copies of books on a bookshelf outside my office each term for the faculty to take and read but I didn’t manage to post the lists here on this blog as I went along. (Not that anyone complained!) I thought I’d put the lists out all at once before we launch into a new school year.

Fall 2016

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010)

Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (Yale University Press, 2016)

Roberto Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press, 2015)

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014)

Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint Press, 2016)

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking, 2016)

Winter 2017

Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power and Passion of Persistence (Scribner, 2016)

Note: Prof. Duckworth visited with Tang Institute fellows and staff last Fall and will be back again on September 13 for a public engagement at PA. We expect to make many copies of her book available again courtesy of one of our trustees.

Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books, 2016)

Joi Ito and Jeff Howe: Whiplash: How to Survive our Faster Future (Grand Central, 2016)

Zadie Smith, Swing Time (Penguin, 2016)

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016)

Bonus entry:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

Note: Astute observers will know that Mr. Coates’ book appeared on a previous HOS bookshelf. It flew off the shelf at the time. I brought it back again as it was meant to be the subject of a town-wide reading program this spring.

Spring 2017

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (Knopf, 2017)

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, 2016)

Hisham Matar, The Return (Knopf, 2016)

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin, 2016)

Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard & the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (Yale University Press, 2017)

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Spiegel and Grau, 2014)

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I am working on this fall’s list and always welcome ideas of things to read!

Commencement Address, Phillips Academy 2016

Posted on June 7, 2016 by John Palfrey

Commencement Address
Phillips Academy, Andover
June 5, 2016
John Palfrey

Welcome, everyone – trustees, faculty, and staff; faculty Emeriti; alumni, families, friends, and – most of all – our beloved students. Thank you for your presence with us today.

I would like to start with a note of gratitude to the adults in the Andover community. Our community thrives as a direct result of individual and collective diligence, support, and love. To all the adults who care for our students, who select our students in the admissions process, and who teach them all the way along: let us all express our thanks to these wonderful people this morning. Please join me in a great big round of applause for the faculty, staff, and faculty Emeriti of Phillips Academy.

—

To the parents and grandparents, guardians and friends: thank you, too. Thank you for the gift of time with the students you have sent to us. I know, for many of you, that it felt like a great sacrifice to part with your children so early, for so many days out of the year – whether as boarding or day students. For this gift of time, you have our enduring thanks. The students you have shared with us have done you very proud.

—

And to the great Class of 2016: Theo Perez and Annette Bell, thank you for your inspiring words this morning. Thank you for your exceptional leadership this year and all the years you have been with us.

To every member of the Class of 2016: thank you and congratulations. You are a spirited group – a brilliant group – worthy of the honor we pay you today as we pronounce you graduates of Andover. Your talent have been well on display these past few days, in our ceremonies and concerts.

I will always remember you. You and I arrived at Andover together, four years ago. You are the first class that I, as head of school, have been with all the way through. It has been a delight to watch you grow and thrive here. I remember you as you were when you arrived at Andover, whether that was four years ago – which seems quite a long time now – or this past Fall. It is safe to say that every one of you has changed as a result of being at Andover – as a result of being with one another, in this very special place.

As we celebrate the great diversity in our community, I am struck by a wonderful combination in the Class of 2016. Many of you are the first in your family to attend boarding school. Though perhaps what is more noteworthy is that a significant number of you will be the first in your family to attend college. We also have graduates whose families have been connected to Andover for literally hundreds of years – including one family with a graduate from the class of 1816, exactly 200 years ago, and a graduate today, in the class of 2016.

Whether your family is here at Andover for the first time, the second time, or the umpteenth time, you have brought much to this community. You have done well at Andover; you have done Andover well; and we all have high hopes for what you will do with the goodness and knowledge that you have gained while you have been with us. We are delighted to be connected with you from here on out.

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My topic this morning has to do with the world beyond Andover, the world in which you enter, for good, this afternoon. I hope that today, this Commencement – meaning, of course, a new beginning – is a chance for you to reflect upon where you have been over the past few years as well as how you might act, in the future, to make the world a better place. How, in short, will you apply the knowledge and goodness that you have learned here when you get out there?

You leave us at a time of enormous transition in society. The one thing I suspect we could all agree on – regardless of political persuasion – is that the rate of change is unprecedented in human history. The problems that humanity will need to address together – and which will affect your generation for even longer than my own – make for a very long list. We face these problems when some of our key political institutions are not in the best of shape. The American political system, for one, is fractured – the United States Congress has a hard time reaching decisions on just about anything, candidates seem to be rewarded for making the most outrageous statements they can, and the common ground between American political parties appears to be microscopically small.

During your time at Andover, some of you have already focused on addressing the big social issues of our time. Perhaps you agree with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who wrote:

“[a]chieving sustainable development on our crowded, unequal, and degraded planet is the most important challenge facing our generation,”

and you were among those engaged with EcoAction in its work on climate change. Perhaps your concern is global poverty and hunger, and you worked on a Real World Design Challenge to help feed the billions who are hungry. Perhaps you traveled with a Learning in the World group to help bridge cultural gaps across nations and peoples. Perhaps you led a Technovation challenge to imagine and start building the next big start-up to create jobs and solve social problems at the same time.

Today, I want to focus your mind on a particular challenge and opportunity that lies before you. As we rush to solve these huge problems, we often reach to technology to help us do that. As you know, I am, myself, very excited about what our use of technology can bring. On this campus, we have used technology in new and exciting ways in our classrooms; and we have been finding ways to use technology to share what we have at Andover with others far from here.

At the same time, I fear that the unfettered use of technology will bring with it bigger problems than it solves.

Your time at Andover has been marked by the rise of many different technologies. Consider the sharp rise in the use of drones over the past four years. That Real World Design Challenge team from Andover that won the Massachusetts challenge? This team proposed the use of a drone to aid farmers in their efforts to grow crops more efficiently and healthfully. The United States relies increasingly on drones for important combat and intelligence missions. Less profound, but more likely to affect you directly: Amazon.com announced earlier this year that it is testing the use of drones to deliver your packages – perhaps those who follow you at Andover will get their packages directly at their dorms, instead of at Central Services in GW. These drones can save lives, improve the economy, and help feed the hungry.

The same goes for self-driving cars. If Andover were in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, we’d already see Google’s self-driving cars making their way around town. These autonomous cars are well on track to come into mainstream use before long, with the promise of reducing traffic fatalities, saving tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone each year.

The list of things that are in the process of being transformed is growing with enormous speed. Artificial intelligence – derived, as you probably know, from the work of Marvin Minsky, Phillips Academy Class of 1945, who visited us this past year and who passed away recently – is behind these many changes. These changes are coming to our kitchens – through the Internet of Things – and into every workplace. These innovations are automating language translation, transforming industrial production, and altering our economy in radical ways.

What do these profound changes mean for you, soon-to-be graduates?

One might draw the conclusion that the important thing is for graduates to know how to master this array of automated systems. To some extent, that is surely true. There are jobs to be had in programming, security, and marketing of new technologies. The government, of any nation you come from, needs you to help secure systems and borders – in cyberspace. The private sector needs you, to grow and to expand our economy, in the United States and around the globe. That is all true – and I do hope some of you pursue these kinds of occupations. I know you will be quite successful in these pursuits if so.

The bigger conclusion that I draw, though, is that we also need the humanists. I hope that all of you, with your newly-minted Andover diplomas, will take full advantage of the liberal arts experience you have had here.

To solve the problems that come along with advanced technology, society will need people with expertise that is deeper than the technical. Increasingly, companies and governments are finding that the people needed to tackle computing problems have not just technical expertise, but the kind of imagination that comes from a liberal arts background.

Think ahead, beyond the immediate. Imagine the kinds of thorny issues that we can expect from a world that is more automated than it is today. With more computers making more decisions, including life-and-death decisions on the roads and in the air, in our waterways and in all imaginable form of transit, we need ethicists who will set sensible rules ahead of time.

Two self-driving cars, for instance, find themselves on a collision course. What answer? Perhaps imagine a drone in the mix. Though tricky, this problem turns out not to be a new one.

There is a long philosophical tradition of the Trolleyologists, who have considered such problems for roughly half a century. The Trolleyologists were a group of moral philosophers who took up a series of questions that may sound quaint today. While there are variants on the problem, the classic version goes something like this:

A trolley – in our parlance, a train – goes out of control. It is speeding toward a crowd of people. The people in the crowd face certain death if the train hits them. You are standing nearby. You realize that you could save them: by flipping a switch, you could send the train in another direction, onto a spur. In doing so, you would divert the train and surely save their lives. Here’s the rub: a man is chained to the tracks on the spur. That man would be surely killed if you divert the trolley away from the other group.

The Trolleyologists spent their time wondering: should you flick the switch to save the group of lives and kill the one man? Though the language sounds old-fashioned, the topics that the Trolleyologists took up long ago are about to explode with frequency and importance.

It turns out, you have huge advantages when it comes to tackling hard problems like this one, and the others you will face – problems that have eluded those of us who are a bit older than you are. At Andover, you have learned much along these lines. You have devoted yourself to the study of a broad and deep set of materials and topics. You have all engaged in the arts, in the sciences, in the study of languages, in English, in history, and in philosophy and religious studies.

You have learned, in a long and grand tradition, how to make good decisions. Sound human judgment is an essential element of a strong society. Especially as we head into a more and more automated world, the decisions that humans make – often up front, or “ex ante,” before the problems occur – will only take on a greater importance.

This liberal arts tradition is not new; nor is it by chance that you are well-prepared for these hard issues. In his inaugural address as headmaster of Andover, John Mason Kemper took up a similar theme:

“There must be faith that in every human being there is a generosity of spirit which will respond to decent treatment and the stimulus of selfless leadership. Tolerance, sympathy, respect must inevitably result in team work. Team work, in turn, can solve many community problems far beyond the capacity of any individual to solve.”

Kemper also said, that day, that:

“[…] knowledge of many fields, a wide range of interests, will enhance the understanding of the interrelation of events and activities.”

The Andover of today – your Andover – is not far different from the Andover of 1948 in these essential respects – no matter how many drones may swirl overhead.

—

You have a second essential advantage. You are bridge-builders. We have asked you, in many ways and in many contexts, to spend time with other youth from every quarter.

You will bring to these essential, emerging problems your ability to get along with one another and to listen to one another. I know that we have not been perfect at that these past four years. (We have not been perfect at that these past four weeks, for that matter.) But I put great stock in the fact that you’ve had a lot of practice. You have lived, worked, argued, and played alongside an extraordinarily diverse group of peers and faculty. You have disagreed with one another, quite vociferously at times. You have hurt one another’s feelings and you have struggled through hard days and long nights. But here you all are. You come together today as a class, the Class of 2016, graduating together.

I can’t possibly say what the biggest problems of tomorrow will be, exactly. But to solve the problems that face society today and will face society going forward, I am certain that we will need people who can listen to one another; people who can appreciate other points of view; people who cherish diversity in all its forms; and people who can work across difference, turning the other cheek, setting aside hate and anger – choosing, instead, empathy and love.

The founders of Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy were devout Christians. Though today we do not invoke religion as often as 238 years ago, I am reminded of a passage from Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.”

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Those who have gone before us have also urged us to do so in the spirit of making a difference. In the words of former Abbot Academy principal Phebe McKeen:

“Girls are urged to consider their education incomplete till they have learned to do some one thing that the world will count it worth paying for.”

We seek, at Andover, for our work to be connected to the world at large – just as the Abbot women of the past urged their graduates. We talk of an Andover Bubble, but we aspire to be more than a place of isolation. Through our work on campus and in off-campus community engagement, we aspire to make a difference in the world. Mostly, thought, we aspire to do that through you – our graduates. What you go on to do is the source of our greatest hope and our greatest pride.

You may have thought your work at Andover has just concluded; I am here today to tell you that your work at Andover is just about to begin. That work is not about exams or races or concerts or plays or art installations on campus – it’s about how you will act in a world that needs your care, your support, your leadership, and your good human judgment. As we bid you adieu, we have enormous faith in what you, the class of 2016, will do – in all your humanity, with all your grace. Congratulations, and Godspeed. Thank you.

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Remarks for Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration 2014 at Andover

Posted on January 21, 2014 by John Palfrey

I am glad to see you all back here, safe and sound, in Cochran Chapel so that we can look ahead, look to the kind of community that we want to build. We come together today to celebrate both community and diversity, the pillars of what sets Phillips Academy apart – a school proudly built of youth and faculty from every quarter, a student body that comes from dozens of countries and nearly every state in America, regardless of anyone’s ability to pay tuition. I am deeply grateful to our colleagues in CAMD, especially Linda Carter Griffith, and all those student moderators and organizers, for their leadership and hard work to make today possible.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is one of the things that Andover does extremely well. I love the idea that we don’t take the day “off” — though we don’t hold regular classes and practices — but we rather take the day “on,” to explore what Dr. King’s legacy means to us today in this community and more broadly. We are especially fortunate to have Maria Hinojosa — Emmy-award-winning NPR journalist — here with us as our keynote speaker this morning, to lead us and to help us think about the importance of voice and narrative.

Often, when we at Andover talk about diversity and when we celebrate Dr. King’s life and legacy, we talk about our commitment, enshrined in the school’s constitution of 1778, to educate “Youth from Every Quarter.” That term has long been our guide, and is alive and well. We are deep into this year’s admissions season, as our good friends and colleagues on Team Shuman and faculty readers are sifting through another extraordinary group of applicants, those who wish to be a part of Andover’s future. This weekend, we were blessed with 1,200 guests — young people and their families from every background who are considering joining our community — for the Day at Andover.

Today, though, I wanted to emphasize another of our founding phrases – the idea of Knowledge with Goodness. You will recall that our Constitution tells us that Knowledge without Goodness is dangerous. As the Phillips Academy Constitution says, when Goodness and Knowledge are united, they “form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.” I take this phrase to mean that it is not enough for us merely to teach you the tools that you will need to thrive in a 21^st century. Surely we need to teach these things – surely you ought to master core academic disciplines. You need to learn critical thinking, how to work in teams, and how to be creative. But you must also learn to combine this knowledge with goodness.

What, you might ask, does Knowledge with Goodness have to do with Martin Luther King Day, or with community and diversity? To my mind, it has everything to do with this day of celebration and reflection. Today, we ask ourselves what it means to be an individual in a community. It has to do with how we act at Andover and who we want to be. It has everything to do with character.

What does it mean to have Goodness along with all this Knowledge that you are acquiring here at Andover? Goodness is a character trait. To me, this goodness is, at its core, about how we relate to one another. It is how we use our gifts both for ourselves and for others. We see this goodness, this character, all around us.

In the last week, I found this goodness, this strength of character, in the speech that Meera gave about her homeland, Syria, rocked with war and torn by the geopolitics of our age. I found this goodness in the performances of all those students who created a stunning production of Dido and Aeneas from scratch: the six student instrumentalists; the voices of Fidelio and the soloists, Caroline and Adam and their friends; the graceful movement of the dance team and the Graham and Emily in their starring turns. I found this goodness in the dedication of the performance to a teacher, friend, and faculty spouse whose passing we mourn together. I found this goodness in the way that our fans cheered our boys hockey team to an amazing comeback against St. Sebastian’s – down 4-2 with two minutes left, they tied the game and then won in overtime, their friends pounding on the plexiglass with every dramatic goal, ending at 5-4. Ditto for the cheering and dancing led by Varsity SLAM, leading on the Girls’ Varsity Basketball in their come from behind win on Saturday. I found this goodness in the stacks of the OWHL, where a senior was walking another student through some science homework that was far beyond my own comprehension. I read it again in a senior’s email to me (Samantha) asking me to say “happy birthday” to her roommate (Emilia). Happy birthday, Emilia!

I see this goodness in classrooms that I visit across the campus. To embrace diversity and difference is not to accept lower standards. In our classrooms, we embrace the strength and necessity of difference in our increasingly complex, interconnected world. We see this strength and excellence in page after page of Out of the Blue, the book that tells the story of today’s Andover better than any other text we have.

Most of all, I find this goodness all around us at Andover as I see your smiling faces on the pathways, making your way from class to sports to activities and back to your dorms and homes, making your mark on this school and this community.

Today, at Andover, we refuse to look away from the challenges of living in a diverse community, in a diverse world. No matter who you are, you may feel uncomfortable in talking about diversity. It is a crucial form of knowledge with goodness to be able to express your views about diversity – to tell your own, beautiful story and to struggle with it along with your peers and your teachers.

As you read Out of the Blue, you may find a piece of yourself in a particular essay or poem. You might be the writer who asked why girls are not allowed to swear the same way that boys can. You might be the boy who identified with Hamlet as he struggled with coming out as a gay male. You might be the gentile who goes to a camp for Jewish kids or you might be the Jewish student who asks whether your own community takes enough action these days. You might be the student from a “small, infamous town” who wrote, “People are always surprised when they see how hard I work in all aspects of my life.” You might be the student who explained to all of us what it means to be a student at Andover who comes from an Asian family.

I want to reply to an Out of the Blue author, who wrote an amazingly powerful statement, which also included a question. You wrote: “It’s important to have diversity. 40% students of color. Is that why I’m here? For diversity? To help some rich kids cross ‘ racial barriers’ they created?” My response is both “yes” and “no.” Yes, you are here for diversity, but you are not alone in being here for diversity. We are all here for diversity, whether yours will be the first generation in your family to go to college or whether your family has been attending Andover since it was founded. That’s why we are all here and we all have to grapple with it. As a white male of privilege, I know that I struggle with what my own identity means – especially in this role as Head of School.

The bottom line is that we all come to Andover to live, learn, and work together as an intentionally diverse community – for many of us, the most diverse community we will ever live in. We are not perfect; no one of us is perfect; we are all a work in progress, individually and collectively. As our former Associate Head of School, Rebecca Sykes, wrote in her essay in Out of the Blue, the point is not that we are great at diversity at Andover; it is that “we do not shy away from the hard conversations” about race and other topics that can either divide us or join us together as a community.

I am struck, as I read back through our Constitution, by how well the ideals of this school hang together, 235 years later. There is profound beauty in how these founding principles intersect. We are blessed with ideals that support one another. Non sibi means that we think not just of ourselves – which is inevitable – but of others. Knowledge with Goodness means that we choose to apply our hard-earned knowledge and skills in pursuit of not just our self-interest, but the community interest. Youth from Every Quarter means that we draw strength from the diversity of perspective, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion in our community. Excellence in academics, athletics, and arts means not the pursuit of a single truth but accomplishment across a vast range of things that you come to master during your time at Andover. Excellence means accomplishment and goodness in a diverse community.

I’ll close today with one of my favorite passages. I urge you, by the way, to read Out of the Blue cover to cover. On p. 211, one person concluded an essay with these words: “Day by day, I think I am doing better and better and I love Andover more and more. I have learned so much from people around me. Andover is a place where people always love you back if you love them. Over time, I felt very much part of the community. I am grateful that I finally blend in and have such great teachers and friends. My heart is full of happiness right now, because I have a lot to treasure. My mom says when people grow up, they do not simply receive more happiness; they learn how to find it. I think I have found my happiness at Andover, and I am looking for more.” I don’t know whose voice that is, but whoever you are, I’m grateful to you. I send you my love for what you wrote.

I wish everyone a wonderful Martin Luther King Jr. day for 2014, here at Andover. Thank you.