Commentary : Death Knell for Noblesse Oblige? : School Shuns Time-Honored Values in Sharon Rogers Incident

The firing of Sharon Rogers by La Jolla Country Day School dramatizes issues that are far more global and frightening than the mere narcissism and ineptitude of one school administration.

The first issue pertains to private school education in general. What is the purpose of a private school education, if a school’s capacity to respond to one of the most serious moral issues of our time, terrorist intimidation, is as limited as any commercial institution in our society viewing money and customer appeal as the chief criterion for policy decisions?

The school in question is quoted in The Times as saying: “You lose 100 kids at $6,000 a head, hey . . . .” The reference to students as “kids at $6,000 a head” is the apotheosis of all in our society that dehumanizes the students we claim to be educating, flattening them into money and numbers, or heads like cattle.

La Jolla Country Day has strengthened this image of commercialism by hiring a public relations firm to sell its position to the public. A commercially minded school simply hires a commercial firm with public relations expertise to explain itself to the public. Why do we need private schools to do that?

The irony--and to my mind the tragedy--of all this is that the tradition of private school education in this country has stressed the building of moral character as a value on an equal footing with academic excellence. The fountainhead for this tradition was the New England preparatory schools, modeled after schools like Eaton and Harrow in England. Just as Eaton and Harrow prepared students for Oxford and Cambridge and for serving their country in positions of leadership, so the New England prep schools prepared students for Harvard, Yale and other prominent universities, envisioning a life of serving their country and enriching their culture as part of their noblesse oblige.

Webster’s Dictionary defines noblesse oblige as “the obligation of honorable, generous, and responsible behavior that is a concomitant of high rank or birth.” Aristocratic to the core, with all the shortcomings attendant upon aristocratic traditions, it nonetheless elevated intangible values, both moral and spiritual, above the more tangible, immediate values of financial gain. A dramatic example at the college level was Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, who in the 1960s cost Yale millions of dollars by speaking out on both civil rights and the Vietnam War and alienating alumni in the process.

Less dramatic examples can be found in stands taken by headmasters that were financially painful to the schools, such as encouraging freedom of expression in school newspapers, even when it meant that students sometimes took positions unpopular with parents and against school policies. In a tradition stemming from Great Britain, they were simply treated as the school’s “loyal opposition.”

The value of teaching students to think for themselves frequently was placed above public relations issues. Controversial boys or girls were often allowed to remain in school, despite a bad record of grades or deportment, if the headmaster had an intangible sense of the student’s worth as a human being and as an eventual contributor to society, even if this decision would seem to compromise the school’s image.

This tradition of noblesse oblige not only produced the leaders of our country in its early history, but even in the last half century it produced those presidents who had the vision and charisma to call the country to sacrifice short-term gain for larger causes.

Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy (“Ask not what your country can do for you . . .”) came from this tradition. So, too, does President Bush. And it is no wonder that he found “very disturbing” the La Jolla school’s firing of Rogers simply because she was the apparent target of a terrorist bombing. Such insensitivity to Sharon Rogers and the larger national issue of terrorist intimidation is entirely inimical to the tradition out of which George Bush has come, rooted not only in a Yale education, but perhaps more formatively in a New England private school.

In a larger and more frightening context, the question raised by La Jolla Country Day is whether this school attitude, like so many developments in California, is a bellwether of things to come in this country: the eventual shrinking of our most cherished institutions--school, church and synagogue, maybe even family--into a tunnel of avarice that blocks out the larger world in order to isolate and maintain one’s own life style. This would be a picture of an elite life style without noblesse oblige: privilege without responsibility and without the heart to share the sufferings of others. It is an Orwellian nightmare, worse than the bombing itself.

Terrorist bombings are one of the dark realities of our age. Whether or not we can see it and understand our responses to it is a matter of consciousness as well as conscience. Learning to live with it, if necessary, standing our ground with it, depends on seeing the darkness externally and inside us.

The bombing of Sharon Rogers’ car threatens the myth that Southern California is a modern-day paradise, set apart from the rest of the world.

It is appropriate for children to imagine themselves in paradise. But when children grow up and go to school, who teaches them to find themselves, to grow and to build in a different world? Teaching them to tunnel themselves away from what is dark and threatening is itself another kind of darkness, a turning back to infancy. It can be fatal for our civilization as well as for La Jolla Country Day School.