“Accept nothing. Challenge everything.” I hope that somehow I imparted this motto long before Moriah ever attended NCGS. I have spent the last 19 years believing that I am my child’s primary teacher. It is my responsibility to mold her and teach her values and morals and to instill in her the priceless value of an excellent education. More than any teacher through magnate elementary and middle schools as well as her private high school experience, it is my responsibility to teach and to train. I should have given her a strong enough foundation in values, morals and teaching by age 16 that she could endure 6 weeks of learning at NCGS.
I believe that children start deciding around middle school about who they are, separate from their parents and siblings and friends. I believe the first way that they begin to determine who they are is by determing who and what they are not. NCGS begins to expose our children (some who have been in a exceedlingly narrow world until NCGS) to other ideas, other opinions, other cultures, other experiences. If you value learning, this is an amazing and wondrous thing. Please expose my child to the issues in Darfur. I hope if nothing else she comes away with an appreciation for her life here in the US and a decision to change some small portion of this world for the better. Please expose my child to different religions. I hope that when she says she is an evangelical Christian, it is because she made that decision for herself and not because she was “born” into it. Please expose my child to the creativity of 6 hour theater and to art outside her comfort zone. I hope that the creativity she learns here will be applied when she works in a 40 hour week job (if she chooses that) or when she parents or when she helps a friend. Please expose my child to people who have chosen a different lifestyle than her. I hope that she appreciates that we live in a country where you are free to choose and I hope that makes her decision for her own life less random and more decisive. Please challenge the ideas that I gave my daughter. I hope that she makes them her own and if not, I hope that she takes the seeds of those values and plants them for herself and grows them her own way. Please urge my child to be exposed to things to analyze, discuss and accept or reject. I hope that she realizes that the re-gurgitation of a normal school education will not help her near as much in life as this approach. Please encourage my child to take responsiblity for her own education by having optional speakers and movies and seminars. I hope that she begins to define herself and know herself so she does not have to go through endless rounds of college parties hoping someone or something will define her instead. Please give my child the opportunity to go to NCGS with other intelligent, curious, enthusiastic, and passionate kids like her. I hope that she does not feel as alone as she had at times in traditional school. I hope that she finds kindred spirits. Please let my daughter explore herself and her ideals in the academic and open environment of college while still having the supervision of high school. I hope that she is better able to handle the social pressures and decisions of college because she experienced it with a safety net at NCGS.
No one formed Moriah at NCGS. She did not come back with an altered sexuality or with liberal values. She did seem to have molted some of her intellectual child-skin. She seemed to me to have wiggled out of her caterpillar cocoon. She seemed to know who the young adult Moriah, independent of me would be. She stood taller. She spoke more surely. She looked people in the eye more and knew the value of her opinions. At NCGS, she seemed to have found her wings.
So, as a parent who saw NCGS as a blessing, I say thank you for this opportunity. I thank you that you grew my daughter taller and stronger. I thank you and I ask you to listen to some of our voices before making any rash decisions about NCGS.
Thank you,
Rebekah Harden
Parent of GSE English ‘05 Alum
