ALUMNI WEEK SPOTLIGHT: EXCERPTS FROM THE HEAD-TO-HEAD CONVERSATION BETWEEN FOUNDING HEADMASTER DAVID FORBES AND CURRENT HEAD OF SCHOOL BURNS JONES
ON HOW CATHEDRAL SCHOOL GOT ITS START: David Forbes: In the 1950s, the Episcopal Church was in the forefront around the country in starting independent schools. There was a famous symposium held at Yale Divinity School around that time which produced a book called The Christian Idea of Education. It was deliberately not called the “Idea of Christian Education,” because the participants said there was no such thing as a Christian education, but there is a Christian idea of education. To this day, I still think we best are enshrined in our motto, Minds, Hearts, Hands, Voices: the idea that to be fully human, you need to develop all these attributes of a seeking mind, a caring heart, a sense of service, and an ability to articulate how you feel. ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE CHOIR AND THE SCHOOL: David Forbes: At the time of the School’s founding, the choir was made up of public school kids who would come after school by public transportation. But increasingly, the kids were unwilling to make that trip. So Dick Purvis, who was our director of music, was desperate to provide a supply for
kids, which is why Cathedral was a boys school only from the start—not to mention as well the philosophy that boys often can thrive better at the elementary level when they are there together by themselves as a single sex school. ON HOW HE DECIDED TO BECOME THE PERMANENT HEADMASTER OF CATHEDRAL: David Forbes: I talked to the headmaster of St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., and I asked him, “Canon Martin, can you tell me why, as a priest, you want to be head of a school?” And he looked at me and laughed and said, “Boy, David, the head of a school is the head of a parish. A priest is a pastor who cares about people and tries to mediate the truth. And a priest is also a prophet who articulates the truth as he sees it and helps others do it, too.” He continued, “A school is an organic organism, an institution. It’s kids, it’s parents, it’s faculty, it’s trustees, it’s friends. So this is a living organism and it’s a community. The job of the head of school is to embody what that nature of that community is and to make it all the more so.” So I walked out of his office and said that’s what I want to do.
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