Pinkerton Academy opts for practicality over tradition

Being a Pinkerton Academy alumni, I was shocked with two of the more major recent developments at the school. On one of her runs a few weekends back my fiancée ran up to the Pinkerton track to get in a few laps and was absolutely floored by the sight up there: a massive cluster of massive pine trees completely gone. It looked like a bomb went off or a huge avalanche came roaring through, uprooting trees all along the way.

Now, I’m not a tree expert by any stretch, but the trees that were cut down had to have been over a hundred years old for sure. Part of the experience of catching a home game up at the field was walking on the trails through the woods, and seeing the field from the trees and just feeling safe in the confines of the giant elderly pines.

But now that is gone.

I had to know why, and we returned later on to see if we could find something out. There was a youth lacrosse game going on and some parents standing around. We asked if they knew what was happening and one parent proudly said they were moving the softball and baseball fields from near the English wing up there, to centralize and keep all the fields together. I was in shock, because that has always been part of just the sheer size and wonder of the massive campus. Trekking through campus to the various sports was just part of being an Astro and a fan.

The other related development I found out about was there will be a new building constructed where the softball and baseball fields are currently to house Freshmen. Word has it that Freshmen will be in that one building their entire Freshman year, completely cut off from the rest of the campus, completely cut off from the culture of Pinkerton and the upper classmen, completely cut off from being a part of the rat race that makes Pinkerton so wonderful. Pinkerton has always been about diverse cultures and experiences, and by doing this they are radically changing what it has always been about. Before you know it, they’ll start segregating sports, making sure Freshmen only play on the Freshmen teams, no matter how talented they are, not matter how gifted they are. They’ll start making separate clubs for the Freshmen, and the upper classmen. I just don’t get it. If they think it is helping the Freshmen class by distancing them from the rest of the school they are completely wrong. Talk about feeling intimidated: you are at a school for an entire year, you still don’t know the layout of the school because you are confined to one building, and you still feel like you aren’t ever a part of the school itself. How does that help them?

Freshmen have always had an extra day, before all the upper classmen came back to school, to become oriented with their surroundings and the buildings, to not feel intimidated. If they are so worried about this sort of thing, what they should do is send the Freshmen back a few days early so they can get some useful time in, maybe even a whole week before the rest of the school comes back. In turn, they should be able to end their Freshman year a week earlier. They should try that for a few years and if it doesn’t work they should look to other alternatives, but this concept of one building for Freshmen is sending quite the message.

I’ve talked to more than a few of my friends and family that went to Pinkerton and all were shocked if not angry about it and I easily understand why. It can’t be about being practical here because you’re only setting the kids up for issues later on, you’re spending money on a building dedicated solely to just Freshmen, and you’re sending the wrong message: you’re saying they can’t hack it with the rest of the school and they need to be coddled. I’m not super old school, after all, I graduated in 1998, but I think there is too much coddling going on anyways, and I think this is just adding to the issues. I’ve heard of Little League baseball rules where if you hit a Homerun it only counts as a double, because they don’t want the other kids to feel bad. At the same time, another ridiculous rule is no matter what the real score is, at the end of the game they rule it a tie so nobody loses. Are you kidding me??? What are we trying to do here with kids? Are we trying to protect them and their feelings? Or do we not want to have to help them deal with failure and build them back up after? It seems to me that is the case.

Imagine this: your son or daughter grows up playing in one of these leagues where they don’t know failure and adversity and how to win and lose, and then they hit high school where they are coddled even more and put into a building for a year with no upper classman, not having a chance to interact with adversity there at all or even form relationships and bonds with different people. Now they go out into the real world and face adversity: how are they going to handle it? Or do you even care?

I’ve thought about this a lot, and at first thought I was making a huge stink about nothing, but the more I think about it the more I am confused and angry about the whole situation. I know Headmaster Mary Anderson at Pinkerton isn’t an evil figure, and I know she is doing all of this because she feels that it is practical to put the fields together, and that for reasons I can’t explain, she thinks it makes sense to put Freshmen in the same building, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.