In Appreciation of Counter-Cultural Schools

Brad Rathgeber

I’m grateful that I started my career in independent schools in girls’ schools. I had great mentors and colleagues at Holton-Arms, and, more importantly, I learned that girls’ schools are powerful places that lift up girls’ voices and places that give girls every leadership opportunity. In girls’ schools, girls can do anything and everything. At their best, girls’ schools are counter-cultural forces to a heteronormative, male norm.
 
Sunday morning, I went for a run in my neighborhood, and found myself at the gates of Howard University, the extraordinary historically black university in Washington DC, and alma mater of our Vice President Elect, Kamala Harris. I entered Howard’s gates, and walked around the campus for a while. Lots of folks were on campus that morning celebrating Kamala Harris, taking pictures, cheering, greeting old friends, and milling about, like me, in gratitude for the school. HBCUs are counter-cultural, too. They fight white supremacy and orthodoxy from their core, and make sure that their graduates know their power and to ensure others are listening to them when “I’m speaking.”
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Of course, all schools have the opportunity to raise their students’ voices, empower them to greatness, and open doors. If we’re honest with each other, though, not all schools do that well for those students outside of the cultural norms.
 
There’s a lesson here that all schools can learn from girls’ schools and HBCUs: if we’re looking to create a better, more just, more fair, more equal world, we have to give students the opportunity to see themselves as capable of anything and everything. 

Vice President Elect Harris told Howard graduates just that in her 2017 commencement address:

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Howard taught me, as it has taught you that you can do anything and you can do everything.

At Howard, you can be a football player and a valedictorian. You can be a budding computer scientist and a poet. You can have a 4.0, intern on the Hill, and still find time to "darty" on the weekend.

So the notion of rejecting false choices that Howard taught us has carried me throughout my career-as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as the Attorney General of California, and now as a United States Senator...

So, graduates, I share all of this with you to make the point that there is no limit to what you can do when you detect and reject false choices.

You can advocate for Environmental justice, and you can be the CEO who commits to cutting your company's carbon footprint.

You can march for workers on a picket line, and you can be their voice inside the Department of Labor.

You can call for greater diversity in the arts and entertainment, and you can be like Howard's own Taraji P. Henson on the screen, bringing to life those "hidden figures."

You can march for Black lives on the street, and you can ensure law enforcement accountability by serving as a prosecutor or on a police commission.

The reality is on most matters, somebody is going to make the decision-so why not let it be you?

Because, if we're going to make progress anywhere, we need you everywhere.

And, sometimes to make change you've got to change how change is made.

So do not be constrained by tradition.

Do not listen when they say it can't be done.

And do not be burdened by what has been when you can create what should be.

Like Baldwin said, the time is always now. So no false choices.

The ability to envision potential and make change is taught well -- I’d argue engrained in student’s minds -- at schools that are counter-cultural. When I was at Holton-Arms, I learned the companion sentiment to these wise words. At Holton, the school’s motto is Inveniam viam aut faciam, I will find a way or make one. So when I think back to Senator Harris’s words, I think about the powerful ways that, at their best, schools can give their students a community that sustains their students and spurs them on to transform the greater world.

Sometimes to make change you've got to change how change is made. 

Do not be constrained by tradition. 

Do not listen when they say it can't be done. 

Find a way or make one. 

If each and every one of our students know and believe these mantras, we will have done good work.