A Letter to Parents

Last weekend I went to dinner at a friends home.  This husband and wife team have two children in college.  One is a senior and the other a freshman and both are at terrific public universities in Virginia.  At one point over dinner my friend asked me how we coach a student through college.  What a great way of asking what is it that we do!  We talked at length about how, in some ways, what I do reflects much of what he does.  We provide a balance of challenge and support to students and when it works students develop all sorts of wonderful talents.  He asked if we parent and while we do not, the comparison is sensible.  To make things a bit more complicated and then eventually clearer, I hope, here’s the textbook version of what we set out to accomplish:

In 1970 William Perry, a Harvard professor, devised a scheme of intellectual and ethical development that addressed a student’s ability to confront conflicting values and beliefs and to use conflict as a tool of integration and growth.  According to many the work that has been most influential in student development has been that of William Perry.  Parents – in my opinion – this is a road map for student success.  While there are a few ways to get to our destination , Perry explains HOW to get there.

William Perry’s developmental scheme is a model of the process through which undergraduates develop, or fail to develop, in their intellectual, moral, and ethical competencies.  Perry’s scheme addresses a student’s ability to confront conflicting values and beliefs and use conflict as a tool of integration and growth.  Learning results from an individual’s ability to integrate previous experience with new experience, synthesizing existing beliefs with new contents and developing flexible and productive life behaviors (Burnham, 1986).  Perry would be thrilled I bet to have the chance to observe the international service experience.

Perry’s scheme is comprised of nine positions, arranged in four groupings that represent qualitatively different ways in which students’ process information.  As students progress through developmental stages they deal more and more successfully with social and intellectual diversity amassing a more concrete set of values and beliefs and finally making commitments based on their personal values and beliefs.  Eventually students assume responsibility to maintain their commitment to these values and beliefs.

Achieving progress along Perry’s scheme is not automatic.  It is a difficult task and often times students resist change by retreating to what is safe – and that is ok.  So the lesson from Perry is consistent with a parenting lesson that I bet most in the audience have employed many, many times.  In higher education we call it proving a balance of challenge and support.  At home it might sound something like being consistent, but fair.  But here we try always to provide a healthy balance of challenge and support.  Too much challenge and a student – quite understandably-  retreats to what is safe.  Too much support and a student does not grow toward a healthy and productive adulthood.

All this said, we help students find meaning and purpose, direction and fulfillment by offering them the most abundant buffet of options imaginable.   At the end of this leg of life’s journey we want every student to have been challenged to think bigger, to dig deeper into his or her soul, to fight for something they believe in, and to have the skills – both academic and humanistic – to approach life’s challenges -near and far- with grit and determination.