A Place of Grace, A Sense of Place

The Dalton School

As high school graduation neared imminence, I remember being genuinely shocked at the discovery that most of my fellow students had grown embittered and disconnected from school—from the headspace, the ideals, even the place itself. “I’m so excited to never set foot in here again,” they would say. I would have stayed in high school forever, if it had been an option.

The Dalton School is renowned for cultivating an unlikely connection with its students, as it did with me. A “Survivor” is what they call people like me—a person who attended The Dalton School from Kindergarten to 12th grade. As a self-proclaimed “highly progressive” Upper East Side Private School environment, Dalton has gone to great lengths over the years to ensure itself as a place that nurtures all multiple intelligences. This standard has always been clearly and meticulously articulated in the school’s geography, architecture, and design.

Each floor is devoted to a different academic discipline. The basement was renovated in 2004, and taken from a linear hallway furnished in cobalt blue lockers and plywood to a stark and glossy-white ergonomic space of nooks and curves that one could liken to an iPod. The floor houses music and rehearsal spaces. The lobby, which houses the main Theater and Extracurricular Offices was renovated in 2006 and equipped with a plasma screen television, whose purpose, other than to display slideshows of happy students, is unclear. The second floor is for Alumni and Research Facilities and Upper Faculty Offices—a warm, mahogany hallway lit in tungsten bulbs that showcases Senior Art Projects. The third floor, which used to be comprised of a separate High School Lounge and Cafeteria for the lower school, was also converted in 2006 into one gigantic, almost circular space, where all eight grades (Kindergarten through 3rd grade have a separate building, a brownstone two blocks away) are intended to mingle together. This step was taken after a student jokingly dubbed the right, poorly lit corner of the High School Lounge “The Dark Side,” because it was where all the students of color tended to migrate.

The fourth floor is science, the fifth and sixth floors are high school homerooms and classrooms, the seventh and eighth floors are for 6th, 7th and 8th grades, the ninth floor is for 4th and 5th grade, the tenth floor is the library (renovated in 2004), the eleventh floor is the Dance studio and Multimedia Labs, and the twelfth floor has all the Visual Arts Studios. The Athletic Center is also a separate building, two blocks away.

Though Dalton functions under the same basic progressive principles it has since conception (dubbed “The Dalton Plan”), it is by nature a constantly fluctuating environment. Though full-time faculty members typically spend the duration of their teaching careers at Dalton, there is tremendous part-time faculty turnover. Each year, 120 students leave and 120 new students enter. The physical landscape of the place alters routinely to match the ever-changing needs of naturally fickle teenagers. It is hard, in a place like this, to cultivate “genius loci,” to really grasp the place’s invariable tone and spirit.

But what Dalton does have is an engagement with the standards of connection that John Brinckerhoff Jackson puts forth in his collection of essays, “Landscape in Sight: Looking at America.” Americans, he notes, don’t necessarily pine for a sense of place. We associate freedom with movement and change, which keeps us from feeling locked down—the ultimate hindrance to our full expression. This would explain why many of my classmates, especially those who had only attended Dalton for their high school years, graduated feeling fully capable of both emotional and physical detachment. The ability to forego nostalgia can be a refreshing lack of burden.

The stories D.J. Waldie sequences in “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” are likely to argue otherwise. They are stories of intense connection to a very specific place, advanced and layered by years upon years spent there. I spent thirteen whole and uninterrupted years at Dalton, during which only one major renovation of the environment occurred (the basement and library). And by then I was in 11th grade, with an attachment to and sense of the place long set in stone. But Dalton, for most who engage with it, promotes J.B. Jackson’s concept of rooted-ness over genuine affection and deep familiarity. Dalton, along with all schools, is an initiator of ritualistic attachment, the kind that we establish when we return day after day to the same place to perform the same activities.

Philip Jackson takes J.B. Jackson’s stand in “Life in Classrooms,” an essay contributed to a compilation entitled, “Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School.” He points to the “ritualistic and cyclic quality” (158) of school, writing: “In order to appreciate the significance of trivial classroom events it is necessary to consider the frequency of their occurrence, the standardisation of the school environment, and the compulsory quality of daily attendance. We must recognise, in other words, that children are in school for a long time, that the settings in which they perform are highly uniform, and that they are there whether they want to be or not” (155). Though ritual can be comfortable, nurturing, even freeing, it can sometimes be perceived as monotony, which gives way to frustration.

Just two weeks ago, Teddy Graubard, an 11th grader at Dalton, jumped out the window of the Dance Studio on the eleventh floor and fell to the sidewalk below, where the entire 4th grade was having their recess. Never has an event so forced Dalton to reexamine itself as a supposedly nurturing environment. There was simultaneously a media blitz on the nature of private school education in New York City, and an immediate rallying on Dalton’s part to counsel its students and determine how events like this could be better prevented. The event was a deep and debilitating reminder among alumni of our sense of community and place where Dalton is concerned.

Why should what happened have happened? It would be vain to presume anything about Teddy’s intentions, but as reluctant as I am to call one more factor to light, it does exist—pressure. A New York City Private School is unquestionably a pressure-cooker of certain expectations. And sometimes the pressure created in an environment manifests itself at great volume.

When a school treats its architecture alone with such scrupulous attention to detail, it sets itself up to be held to outrageous standards in other areas. The percentage of students that Dalton sends to Ivy League universities each year is consistently called into question and used to either attack or validate the notion of a progressive private school. Philip Jackson even implies that in the event of a tragedy like Teddy’s, the teachers would be the ones to blame, given that students spend the large majority of their time with their educators, and that a student’s education is likely the stem of all emotional shortcomings.

James Howard Kunstler, in his book, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape,” would argue that an environment can be shamed for not providing a sense of community. Kunstler would surely argue that Dalton, as a body of people, and as a space designed for learning and growth, is responsible for the lives its students lead—whether they are successful, whether they’re happy, and whether they feel their education held influence over those factors. J.B. Jackson would say that a sense of place might not be created in an environment if a student did not create a connection through an event or ritual.

The Dalton School

Waldie argues that routine is hardly a prison, but the way that we can free ourselves from the bonds of time. And Philip Jackson notes that students become “exceptionally familiar [with their school] through prolonged exposure” (158). So while J.B. Jackson would say that Teddy should have felt free as a result of his changing environment (and Dalton definitely fluctuates for current students more than it ever did for me), Waldie and Philip Jackson would say that Teddy should have felt free by treating his school as what a school is by nature—a constant of both place and ritual.

Surely Teddy, as a star athlete, artist and student, must have made many connections to his environment and ritual. That Teddy chose to end his life at his school speaks to how he must have felt that Dalton encompassed his life. Sure, he may have intended to make a statement about the pressure he felt in his environment, but his suicide would not have taken place at Dalton unless Teddy felt extreme rooted-ness to or affection for, the place.

When the news was released to me, I was met with an inescapable desire to simply be there. Though it had been years since I last visited, I just knew, in that moment, that I had to be standing outside, to be feeling the presence of teachers I had treasured and students whom I do not know, but are now living the life I had loved so dearly. And though at first I worried that, as one of hundreds of alumni, being there would not be “my place,” I knew the moment I arrived, that it was my Place.

WORKS CITED

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Landscape in Sight: Looking At America. Yale University Press: 1997.

Jackson, Philip. “Life in Classrooms.” Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School. Ed. Bob Moon, Ann Shelton Mayes. Routledge: 1994. 155-160. 

Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape.

Waldie, D.J. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. W.W. Norton & Company: 1996.

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