HEAD LINES
Mission Tension 5:
Rich Yet Unhurried
October 2023
Dear Trinity Community,
Last year we started a series of Head Lines messages exploring distinctives of Trinity’s mission, especially some of the tensions that are built into our identity as a school. My aspirations outran my outputs, and we ran out of school year before we ran out of tensions. So I’m picking this back up for the 2023–2024 school year. The four tensions we addressed last year were non-covenant but Christian; evangelical, orthodox, and ecumenical; relying on the Bible and welcoming all truth as God’s truth; and classical and Charlotte Mason pedagogy.
We said that our missional tensions are purposeful, like a guitar with several strings holding tension in tune. Trinity’s tensions go back, most of them, to the founding of the school and the codification of the mission. Tensions can be stressful, and we may feel the urge to resolve them, to move further to one end or the other to release the pressure. But to do so would be to untune the harmonious mission of Trinity School.
Mission Tension 5: Rich Yet Unhurried
The first thing to be said about the tension rich yet unhurried is that it is often ignored, or perhaps transcended. How many times have you heard someone (even the Head of School) refer to Trinity’s “rich and unhurried” education? It’s common to make these two into a hendiadys, in which two words are used to say one thing. A classical hendiadys (in contrast to a commonplace one like “good and loud” or “nice and warm”) has elements of surprise and what has been called eccentric coordination. In this way, rich and unhurried is a more complex—and, well, richer—expression than saying simply “rich” or simply “unhurried.” This way of mutual definition is not foreign to Trinity’s mission, as our Expanded Mission Statement (EMS) acknowledges:
Sometimes an unhurried education will be a rich one.
And working from the other end, a rich education will require a certain ordering of student time that is in line with the rhythms of an unhurried life. So you’ll not find me pedantically correcting people when they say, “rich and unhurried.”
At the same time, let’s not overlook the important fact that the mission of Trinity School espouses a rich yet unhurried education. Where lies the tension which that important little conjunction marks?
We usually locate the tension between Trinity and something outside our school: between a rich (and unhurried) education on the one hand, and on the other the sort of education with “burdensome course loads that leave little time for deep, joyous learning or for personal pursuits beyond the classroom” (Trinity’s EMS). This external tension is not an unimportant tension to manage, and much of our EMS is devoted to staking out Trinity’s position vis-a-vis these outside pressures. But this is not what the phrase “rich yet unhurried” principally has in mind, nor is it the kind of tension I am focusing on in this series. I am looking for the internal tensions of our school, the ones that are built into our DNA, if you will. In other words, I’m deeply interested in the fact that the “yet” is part of the mission statement, not just a commentary on the mission’s relationship to cultural trends.
Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.
(Ecclesiastes 4:6)
This has long been our locus classicus of Scriptural authority for our unhurried posture. An unhurried education flourishes when we seek to do a few things well. And where a rich education is devoted to depth over breadth, then slowing down to foster reflection, creativity, and high-order thinking will complement rich learning. But the meaning of a rich education cannot be exhausted by the idea of depth over breadth. For one thing, breadth of educational experience is not unimportant. Thomas Huxley famously said, “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” In a Google world, this learning strategy might play out a little differently, but I wouldn’t love for Trinity students to be narrow experts and specialists when they graduate. The ideal of the generalist who knows how to learn anything and who has practiced that on many things is a good model for us.
Charlotte Mason said that education is a “science of relations,” meaning that children are endowed with minds capable of forming relations with knowledge and experience of many sorts, from nature, to science, to literature, to art and music and much more. One of Mason’s dominant metaphors for teaching and learning was a feast. “We spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programmes and each small guest assimilates what he can” (A Philosophy of Education, 183). This principle underlies Trinity’s commitment to resource classes in Middle School, to electives in the Upper School, to clubs, to the arts and engineering beyond the graduation requirements, to Winterim, to Lower School field trips and unit studies.
But all this comes with a cost. Anyone who has spread a literal feast for family and friends knows that at least for the host—who, at Trinity, is the teacher—the preparation, delivery, and cleanup is not often an unhurried affair. And whether an educational feast is freeing and unhurried for the learner is another question. Many a student who enrolls at a well-resourced university is giddy with the wide and rich array of learning opportunities at such a well-endowed institution. But all those options can also become overwhelming. The feast of learning must be rich, but we cannot sample it all. Mason’s wise words are worth repeating: “Each small guest assimilates what [s]he can.” Rich yet unhurried.
We can better hold this tension when we remember that we are going for lifelong learners. We don’t need our students to sample every dish before they leave this place. We need them to learn how to learn and to grow in their love of learning. And then they can go on learning for the rest of the days that God gives them.
Trinity’s students—and we also—have an inspiration in Jesus, who went deep into the Law and the Prophets, constantly quoting and paraphrasing and channeling the Hebrew Scriptures (much of which he surely knew by heart), but whose life and learning were narrow by modern standards (except for an infant sojourn in Egypt, he never left Palestine). He was an astute student of human nature, as evidenced by the many significant encounters the Gospel writers chronicle; but his time on earth was short, and when his hour came, he went deep with a few disciples (John 14–17) before he surrendered all his human life and learning to his Father, trusting that God’s good purposes had been accomplished in his life. I like to think that a rich yet unhurried education is a taste of the kind of experience that believers have when, in Christ, our hearts rejoice and no one can take our joy from us (John 16:22). And it may indeed be that the Kingdom of God will be a rich yet unhurried place to praise him forever and ever.
Non Nobis,
Chip Denton
Head of School