Postcards

The following is Ms. Fried’s speech to Middle School and Upper School students at the Opening Assembly for the 2024-2025 academic year.

I love postcards. As a child, I would stand in front of the circular rack in a gift shop and turn it round and round as I looked for just the right one to tell the story of my travels. (This summer I received a holographic one from a student who had visited Yellowstone. The animals come to life!)

I’ve always been partial to postcards with a single image, feeling they have a bigger impact on the reader. 

As I begin my final year with you, I’ve been thinking about what image I’d most want to see on a Brearley postcard. 

I think we’d all agree that there would be a lot of possibilities to choose from. The best part of my day is watching you perform in myriad ways. Homecoming is right around the corner! A Homecoming postcard would show our school spirit! Or maybe it could be a shot of this year’s musical, Mama Mia? I can see the costumes now! Or perhaps one that captures the beauty of the chorus with lit candles in hand singing "Dona Nobis Pacem" while surrounding the audience in this very performance hall on a chilly December night. That piece makes me cry every time! I’m sure there are some great images from the senior class trip to Camp Jewell earlier this week or maybe Ks walking through 590’s doors for their first day of school. The list goes on and on. Any one of these would tell an important part of Brearley’s story. 

As I considered my many choices, I decided that my Brearley postcard wouldn’t represent an event but rather something even more special and, dare I say, unique. Let’s hold that idea for a moment and let me share a part of my story.

Before I came to Brearley, I served as the Dean of Admission at Andover, a large boarding school, for 21 years. When I left there to come here, my colleagues calculated that I had spent three and a half years traveling the world to identify students and partner schools for the academy. Each year, I would visit more than 100 schools, some well known (I visited here) and also new schools such as charter schools, rural school houses for employees of the park service and temporary schools set up in refugee camps and natural disaster areas. There are many things I am still learning about education, but schools are something I know a lot about.

And thus, my Brearley postcard would capture what I think is the most important experience at Brearley—that moment of connection between students and their teachers and with the subject matter in the classroom. The academic program at this school—the skills you develop through it, the love of learning it nurtures, the confidence it instills, the ambition to learn more it inspires, the relationships between student and teacher and among students it fosters—will stay with you your entire life. It will guide your academic and life decisions. You will find yourself turning to it over and over again. Other than your family and your health, I believe there is nothing more critical to your happiness, well-being and success in life than your education and this one is among the best in the world. And it’s yours to embrace. 

Does it challenge you? Yes. Do you have to work hard, sometimes very hard? Yes. Do you always get the grade you hoped for despite putting in your best effort? No. Does it require you to be open to information and ideas that ask you to reconsider something you thought you knew for sure? I hope so.

A Brearley education is constantly evolving with each new teacher and departmental review. But at its core, it maintains its unwavering commitment to the liberal arts—a set of subjects spanning arts, sciences, humanities and social sciences—critical and creative thinking, originality, hard work and the pursuit of truth.  

There are easier places to be a student and to be a teacher, for sure, but generations of girls have come here and stayed here because this school offers what I sometimes refer to as the “Olympics” of elementary and secondary education. Understandably, it’s hard for you to see the arc of a Brearley education when you are in academic training, but that arc has been traversed by generations of students who share a common story, that this was the most formative intellectual experience of their lives.

Seniors, you know this already. Something very unusual happens in the spring of Class XI at Brearley. Students who begin to understand the rarity of this program and the relationships they form with their teachers and peers hold this experience even closer than they did before. Even though our seniors are ready to head out on the next phase of their academic journey, we, the adults in the community, continue to hold you close for your final intellectual adventures with us. In the end, there is a mutual release, but until that time all of you, Middle School and Upper School students, are engaged in an academic experience that brings our Mission Statement to life. The program requires you to go beyond the familiar by exposing you to subjects you may not be interested in at this moment or that may be difficult for you, and asking you to grapple with complex ideas, to be open to learning from and with others and to think for yourself. 

This final principle belief of a Brearley education—to think for yourself or originality—is every bit as important as your academic performance or work ethic. We know from a Zephyr article last year that some of you have experimented using Artificial Intelligence in your school work. And yes, we have had discipline cases when your teachers discover that AI had been used in the conception, writing or presentation of a project. My counsel to you on this matter goes beyond a caution about rule breaking to impress upon you that allowing any system or person to think for you runs against the very reason this school was founded—to allow girls to think for themselves, to give them an individual voice and a place where they would be challenged to inhabit and exhibit their talents that society rejected. To be taken seriously. This education is yours to hold closely. Do not diminish it by giving it over to anyone or anything else. You are enough. 

Without a visible arc of your education journey, you may not feel in this moment that this education is yours or that you are enough but I promise you, five, ten, twenty, fifty years from now, you will know in your bones its value to your career, for sure, but also to your life. Your Brearley education will be your constant and perhaps most useful companion. My only wish is that more girls could have this experience. 

So I encourage you, as one of the fortunate few, to embrace your intellect. Inhabit the mind of an explorer in your studies and a teacher in sharing your ideas. Find joy in studying alone and together. Be ambitious in your aspirations. Give it your best effort and the necessary time. The arc of a Brearley education gradually reveals itself. In the meantime, have faith in it, as we do in you. 

Let’s have a great year!