Lessons Learned

A self-styled ‘troublemaker’ shares wisdom gleaned from 57 years in education.

By Chester E. Finn Jr.

Yes, I’ve learned plenty in the 57 years since I entered 1st grade in Dayton, Ohio’s Fairview Elementary School, and the four decades since I taught social studies at Newton High School in Massachusetts. Let me share a dozen of the most profound lessons.

1. Great, committed teacher/adviser/mentors, high standards, a focused curriculum, a culture of achievement, and plenty of hard work by students well aware that real consequences attach to their performance—what more does a successful school need? Yes, I’m talking about the Knowledge Is Power Program and Amistad, the Academy of the Pacific Rim and Stuyvesant, and others of today’s super-schools. But I’m also talking about the Catholic schools of the 1960s and my own time at Phillips Exeter Academy, where by senior year I was awakening at 3 a.m. to study. It paid off, for me and lots of others. (I was able to skip my freshman year at Harvard.) But it was sink or swim—and those who treaded water were sometimes invited not to return for the next semester.

2. People are good at different things—and plenty of human traits matter besides academics. At the Colorado Outward Bound School in 1962, those who excelled had physical prowess, street (and mountain) smarts, stamina, and the ability to forge and lead a group. Integrity and impulse-control mattered, too, I deduced, when my tent-mate, a youthful auto thief sent to Outward Bound by a Denver judge, ate our four-day food ration on day one—and later broke into an abandoned miner’s cabin to help himself through the wilderness “solo survival” while I plucked watercress from a spring and carefully husbanded my secret...