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5000 Clubside Road
Lyndhurst, Ohio 44124-2595
440.423.4446
12465 County Line Road, P.O. Box 8002
Gates Mills, Ohio 44040-8002
440.423.4446
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Welcome from the Head of School
Hawken has a heritage of addressing real needs in the wider community. Since our
founding in 1915, when we adopted John Dewey's Progressive philosophy of education
as an alternative form of schooling for Cleveland families, our focus on individual
development has become common practice in all great schools. Whether growing a high
school in the 1960s, providing a coeducational option in the 1970s, or starting a
preschool in the 1990s, Hawken has stayed out in front of what Cleveland students and
families need. Now our teachers are working on brain-based research, Middle School
block scheduling, interdisciplinary teaching, and enhanced advising -- all of which will
build on the strong foundation of our almost-90 years. As Cleveland worries about a
"brain drain," it will be these kinds of programmatic innovation that will attract new talent
to our city and bring our own children back to settle here.
What makes a Hawken education so special? We know that each individual student
has to find his or her own voice, developing unique strengths at an individual pace. We
also know that students have to be ready for a complex world in which they will need to
thrive with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and values. Hawken has that
rare balance of academic rigor and high standards mixed with a human scale that keeps
our students engaged and eager to learn, without the School being a pressure cooker.
When the next electrical grid goes down, not just in North America with fifty million
people affected, but across many continents with hundreds of millions of people put at
risk, the international emergency response team will need Hawken graduates who can
go to Indonesia or South America, speak the language, navigate the culture, have the
technical skills, and collaborate with teammates from other cultures to solve the global
issues that the next generation of students will inevitably face.
While Hawken is a college preparatory school with an excellent national reputation, it is
much more than that. Hawken talks about "the better self," a "higher plane of life" for the
next generation, and "Fair Play" -- these are the values in which we must root the skills
and habits of the heart in order to give our students the first class education they
deserve.
James S. Berkman
Head of School
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