Ashley Curtis' Speech
Summer Festival 2009, June 20

I’m Ashley. I’m the only one of these 6 fish that many of you have never seen before today. But I’ve been here before. My wife Melissa and I taught at the Ecole for 13 years, starting in 1988. Melissa isn’t here today, but she’ll be here in August and will be the Dean of Academics for the American Program. We’ll be coming with our children Sonia and Caleb, who will be students here, and Joshua, who will then head back to college in the US.
I’ve always felt a special magic at the Ecole, something hard to describe but easy to experience. But whenever I ask myself, what makes up that special magic, I come up with nothing more or less than the very people who are here – students, helpers, teachers, staff, all developing and growing, becoming who they are.
As director, my most important task must be, to treasure and preserve that special magic. But here I run into a contradiction. Because if the magic is all about becoming, changing, growing, what exactly do I want to preserve? What do I want to keep the same?
I can try to get out of this contradiction by saying, preserve the idea, Werde der du bist, preserve the conditions that make that idea possible. And of course this is valid, in its way, and of course it’s probably the essential job of the school leaders. But it’s somehow not quite convincing, not quite satisfying, in the gut. Because I don’t think the magic is an idea, or a set of practices. The magic is the developing people themselves.

I see no other way but simply to embrace the contradiction, with all the chaos that a contradiction implies. And indeed, when I think of the Ecole, with all its rules and structures and traditions, it’s the living, breathing, fertile, rich, unpredictable chaos at its base that gives it its real life. A good chaos, mostly, a healthy chaos, the chaos of two hundred people following their own individual paths of development while at the same time learning to live closely with each other, a chaos out of which springs the kind of startling creativity, growth, and learning that are on display this weekend.
Heraclitus said, you can’t step in the same river twice. His pupil said, you can’t step in the same river even once. Think about that. It’s the contradiction I’m talking about, with the Ecole as the river.

I’ll close with one more quote: the English poet William Blake said, Dip him in the river who loves water. Dip him in the river who loves water.

Barbara and Hans, we’re about to go for an extended dip. It’s a good thing that we love this water!