The Legacy and Future of Seven Hills

As we look ahead to the unification of the Doherty and Lotspeich programs on the Hillsdale Campus, I find myself thinking about our school’s past, present, and future. Most of us know that Seven Hills, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, was formed through the merger of three schools: Miss Doherty’s College Preparatory School for Girls, Mrs. Lotspeich’s Clifton Open-Air School, and the Hillsdale School. But to truly understand our legacy, we must look back even further, taking in the bold vision of those three schools’ founders.

In 19th-century America, schools looked a lot like factories. Children sat in their places while the teacher stood over them, ensuring that everyone was doing the same things at the same times. Students were taught in a single way and were measured against the same benchmarks. They completed identical primers and copybooks, whether the work was excruciatingly hard or stultifyingly easy.

In many parts of the country, segregation ensured that the students even looked the same. In other parts of the country, schools were open to students of many backgrounds, but the languages and cultures of their homes had to be left at the schoolhouse door. Uniformity was the watchword.

After all, Victorian schools were modeled on that paragon of uniformity, the factory floor. Nineteenth-century schools were in a very real sense producing workers to staff these factories and workhouses. Instead of sitting at a desk and writing on a slate, you would graduate to sitting at a loom and weaving or standing at a workbench and riveting.

In this context, it was audacious to make a higher claim for education. Imagine opening a school that would prepare girls for college, as Miss Doherty did. Imagine trading the classroom and conformity, for the open air and individuality, as Mrs. Lotspeich did.

The announcement declaring the opening of the Hillsdale School, one of the three schools that would merge to become Seven Hills, reads “Shaping of Personality as Important as Scholasticism” and “Education to Be More Joyous Thing.” That’s 1927, nearly 100 years ago, but linking education to joy sounds bold even today.

If you look back to images of Miss Doherty’s kids in the 60s, you will see a definition of Joy in Learning.

The schools that would eventually come together to form Seven Hills were at the vanguard of the progressive educational reform movement that swept through the country in the early 20th century. John Dewey was perhaps the best-known advocate of this movement. In his seminal 1916 book “Democracy and Education,” Dewey laid out principles that upended the factory approach to schooling. Here’s the kind of bold statement that Dewey liked to make: 

“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”

 Revolutionary educators like Dewey were committed to reaching the individual learner, not creating an educational assembly line.

This student-centered, academically ambitious, and joyous approach to teaching is entwined in our cultural DNA as a school. And it jumps out from our mission statement today: “Seven Hills engages hearts and minds, guiding students to cultivate their unique capabilities and preparing each for a meaningful role in a rapidly changing world.”

My own best experiences as a student, teacher, and administrator, have been in classrooms and groups that centered on the kinds of qualities that our mission statement speaks to. I’ve spent my whole life in schools, going from college right back to teaching in a sixth grade English classroom. Along the way, I’ve suffered through some Dickensian factory-like classes, where we processed mimeographed worksheets all day, and I’ve been in some lifechanging, student-centered ones. Like every Seven Hills teacher, I bring to school with me every day the aspiration to emulate the best of my own teachers and the most inspiring of my colleagues.

Why this glance backward into our school’s history and into our own past experiences as students and teachers? I think we need to know where we have come from, in order to see where we should go next. There are vital questions to be asked. Who have we been, who are we now, and who might we become in the future?

Campus unification will call on us all to hone in on our mission and our sense of identity as a school. Over the next three years, we will engage teachers, students, and parents in an ongoing design process to identify the best and most beloved aspects of Doherty and Lotspeich’s respective cultures, traditions, programs, and spirits. This is likewise an opportunity for us to incorporate into our new Lower School some of the best practices and innovations in the field of early childhood and elementary education. Our Lower School teachers and administrators are already planning a series of educational road trips, in which we will visit and learn from some of the best elementary schools in the country. This is time for us to look within and without, to be at once introspective and exploratory.

Unlike many of the school’s previous projects and decisions, there is a sense of loss associated with this one. Families, teachers, alumni, and students who love the Doherty program may be understandably saddened or upset by the news of our campus and Lower School unification. Lotspeich community members might also be concerned about what this will mean for aspects of the division that they know and value. I imagine this was the reaction 50 years ago as well, when our forerunners merged into one school.

In light of the unification, I hope that we can think of Doherty not just as a place, but as a culture, a spirit, and a community that we will carry forward into the new Lower School. As we look ahead to the next few years, we must channel the bold vision of educators like Miss Doherty and Mrs. Lotspeich, building a new lower school program that honors our past and looks to our future.