Looney Starts Year With Forward-Focused Message

Head of School Scott Looney welcomed faculty, staff and parents to the 2008-2009 school year with a look at the past and a glimpse of the future. \"The needs of children, their nature, have not really changed so much,\" he said. \"What has changed, dramatically, is the world our children will enter,\" he went on to say. In each of his presentations, Looney showed early video footage of Hawken`s students from 1926 participating in what was believed to be Field Day. The students, he noted, were lively, full of energy, playful and curious and were it not for the period dress and early automobiles, it would have been easy to assume the students were from 2008. Fast forward some 85 years and today`s students possess those innate characteristics, but the world is one that Looney said \"we cannot possibly predict,\" full of exponential growth and change as illustrated in the second video of Looney`s presentation. \"Never before has a generation of students been able to participate in global conversations without needing wealth or backing to do so, to use technology to organize around ideas rather than geography, to connect with and collaborate with students elsewhere in the world to solve problems...,\" he said. Hawken`s role in all of this, Looney said, is \"to help our `timeless` children navigate their way into the ambiguous future.\" As the School prepares for its University Circle campus, Looney said the initiative was just one of the catalysts, among many others, in galvanizing an academic program that is second to none, positioning Hawken \"as a proudly, confident, forward-focused school that is rooted in time-tested best practices around our founding educational ideals.\" \"We don`t have far to go to achieve that goal...,\" Looney said.