#001 Henry Rogland [Class of 2010]

 To the administrators and faculty.

It is only after a significant time apart from it that I can begin to unpack my time at the Oaks. My tenure there concluded over a decade ago and yet memories of my time there resurface to this day. I would like to say that they are all happy memories, but that would be inaccurate. I would like to say that they are not painful, but most of them are. Most of all I would like to say that the education I received was balanced and has remained relevant, but again I cannot.

To speak briefly of the education I received, in hindsight it was mixed and imbalanced. A western centric education is part of the terrain when speaking of classical Christian education and the little attention paid to other parts of the global was often anachronistic, inaccurate, or a strawman portrayal of other belief systems besides Christianity.

And what of the Christian element? One class that I was a part of was told by a then teacher now headmaster in cloyingly earnest terms that “Statistics is inherently a Christian science.” This sentence has stuck with me for more than a decade in part because of the inherent contradiction of the phrase ‘Christian science” but also because of how often the school tried to draw a parallel between events or achievements in society and culture and the society being Christian. Achievements were always something that God was to be credited for, but never failures. Personal failures in education were attributed equally to a rebellion with God or to not applying oneself fully to the education.

 To speak further about the education, one of the focal points of education at the Oaks is the rigorousness of the education. What might have begun as a well-intentioned attempt at fostering a love of learning quite severely missed its mark.

 At one juncture in my time there, recording the amount of time you spent daily on homework was part of the routine and required. It was not uncommon then for homework times to exceed 5 or 6 hours each night as an average, let alone the number of times the homework extended into the early hours of the next day just to stay afloat. And what does that do for the students? After a certain point, no one really cares what they’re learning because they’ve got a quota to meet and penalties if it isn’t met. Labor for labor’s sake alone is worthless. The focus on the knowledge itself and why it matters is lost when the focus is on quantity rather than quality.

Exceedingly little care was placed on the wellbeing and personal lives of the students themselves. At no point was the question asked: “What is the human cost of what we’re having them do?” 

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not speak about authority at the Oaks. For a school that has put so much time into forging students into effective orators and debaters, it entertains surprisingly little tolerance for debate regarding its own teachings and methodology. Or at least it did. Perhaps things have changed. I hope that’s the case.

There was an unstated Oaks dogma which demanded that its claims towards Christianity and education not be questioned. A strange duality was evident as the faults of other doctrines or belief systems were laid bare but the harder questions and claims that Christianity had to account for were never addressed to the depth that was necessary.

Ultimately, the sentiment that arises when I think about my time at the Oaks is the same one that arises when I think of my 3^rd favorite kind of baking chocolate, bittersweet.

I made several lifelong friends and had several excellent teachers one of whom gave me insight and direction for what my skills were and what my career path could be and now I do it for a living. But that came at great cost and it remains unclear whether that was a price worth paying.

Now success comes despite, not because of, my time at the Oaks and my sentiment for the institution can be expressed in a quote by John Greenleaf Whittier: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, it might have been.”

 - Henry Rogland

For tracking purposes: #001