In the wake of the Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist rally in Charlottesville this past weekend, most Americans responded with shock and anger. Pundits from the Left and the Right expressed outrage and declared how un-American these victim-seeking, all-but-hooded, torch-bearing degenerates were. Their ideas were, after all, antithetical to American values. Representative Thomas Garrett of Virginia angrily declared that “these people are not who we are as Americans” and correctly pointed out that many of those assembled were not from Virginia. Our own Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted that the "haters" are "agitators in search of relevance and publicity for a vile cause very few people support.” The popular CNN commentator Ana Navarro tweeted “America, this is not who we are! We must stand together and condemn this!” Sally Yates tweeted, “The poison spewed by Nazis, White Supremacists, and the KKK is not who we are!”

This past summer I read a thought-provoking article by Paul Barnwell in The Atlantic titled, “Students’ Broken Moral Compasses: The pressures of national academic standards have pushed character education out of the classroom.”  While Barnwell’s primary targets are public schools, where standardized testing and the Common Core have created less room for educating the whole child, there are still important takeaways for independent schools like Shorecrest. 

Remarks from Convocation 2016 -

Let me put forth an early disclaimer. This is not a political speech. I am not advocating for a particular candidate. When I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you as we begin this academic of year of such great promise, I was genuinely conflicted. On the one hand, the ugly political climate that we have all witnessed thus far, coupled with the concern that any comment I make about the presidential race could be construed as either supporting or denouncing one of the candidates, made me not want to touch this topic with a ten-foot pole.