By Mauranda Men ’16, Staff Writer

Rather than dissecting the mission statement word by word, as some other articles in this feature have done, you could say I only went skin-deep by focusing on the overarching structure of the sentence. What stood out, though, was intriguing and slightly alarming. In this statement, Newark Academy states that its purpose is to “contribute to the world” students instilled with X, Y, and Z. It seems laughable at first, that the school actively seeks to process and imbue outgoing students with a certain parcel of qualities, but the connotations are astounding if thought about more deeply. As Mr. Hawk so delicately put it, “Schools are organized in business models; that’s how we’re set up. The nature of that structure means that we treat our tasks as rendering service or producing a commodity.”

Mr. Hawk’s candid words became a launching point, and the questioning began. My experiment of sorts simply consisted of one query, posed to community members from a variety of demographics: “To what extent do you believe this school is a factory?”

Admittedly, this question was never directly asked to a teacher because of the variety of negative looks it garnered from adults passing by as I asked around; interpret that as you wish. The questioned subjects were determined by grade, since that would indicate the progress of Newark Academy’s educational influence on those asked. The form of the question was quite deliberate; most upperclassmen would agree that the student body has a certain conditioned reaction to the words “to what extent,” so it was also a way to see how that reaction would play out.

Most middle schoolers actively avoid the taller menace, but one group of sixth graders was happy to comply. Their immediate response to the question was not so immediate, since the structure (and probably the implications of the subject matter) threw them a little, but after thirty seconds they were all vehemently answering the question at once. All confidently denied that school was anything like a factory. Pravan Chakravarthy ‘21 summed up their reaction quite simply: “Even though at school we all do the same things, like classes and lunch, school is here to make you smarter.” Not wanting to freak them out further, I thanked them for their time, declining to mention the tight connection between “make” and “manufacture.”

The freshmen, who have been exposed to “to what extent” for a relatively short time, had two main reactions: one being the pride in understanding my question fully, and the second being stunned silence in the wake of what I was asking them. They, too, believed in the Academy having far more redeeming qualities than that of a factory. In particular, Brady Sheaffer ’18 noted what he believed to be an important distinction: “In a factory, the same thing keeps being produced. Here we’re all different.” The sophomores, though, were a little more cynical. They generally believed that the similarities became clearer when they had time to think about it. The least certain of their answers out of all of the groups questioned, the short version of their reaction was Eva Verzani’s response: “I wouldn’t say it’s not a factory.”

The juniors and seniors were far more disillusioned. Most of them looked like they wanted to strangle me as soon as the words “to what extent” escaped my lips. Their overwhelming response was that the Academy is a factory. Although it may be considered an extreme comparison, their replies still contained lots of certainty and were quite focused on the next looming epoch: college. Declining to be named, oftentimes the students focused on the school’s emphasis on the college process and the general way in which the packaged individuals are exported. After all, as Katherine Hall-Lapinski ’15 noted with a shrug, “Schools are institutions,” words strongly sparking a connection to Mr. Hawk’s explanation earlier.

The true answer to the question is insignificant. Any student leaving the school, having been defined by our mission statement, could argue either side. There’s no doubt that conflicting interpretations are extensively explored here. What is really intriguing is the arc that the answers of each demographic seemed to follow, and the interesting reaction that each demographic had a more or less unanimous answer to the question – despite the mission statement’s emphasis on “individuals.”

            Is that Newark Academy’s mission?