Transcription of Love Maine Radio #328: Shay Stewart-Bouley and Laura + Malcolm Gauld
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Topsham. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #328, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 31, 2017. Today’s guests are Shay Stewart-Bouley writer and executive director of the anti-racism organization Community Change and Laura and Malcolm Gauld, president and executive chairman of the Hyde School in Bath, and co-authors of
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space including Ingen Jorgenson, Brenda Serione, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at ArtCollectorMaine.com.
Lisa Belisle: Shay Stewart-Bouley is the executive director of Community Change, a nearly 50-year-old anti-racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. She is also the creator of the well-known blog “Black Girl in Maine.” Thanks for coming in today.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Thank you for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You have actually a lot of interesting things that we could talk about.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right!
Lisa Belisle: I’m most interested in, I guess, first coming to Maine. You’ve been here for quite a while, 2002.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right.
Lisa Belisle: Why choose essentially one of the whitest states in the nation?
Shay Stewart-Bouley: I didn’t choose this state intentionally, and I rarely talk about the reason why I moved here. I’ve been married twice. My first husband and I, when we divorced in, God knows, 1990-something, our son was still pretty young. We’ll just say that our custody arrangement at one point just required us to be in the same place. Since he had moved back here and was unwilling to move back to Chicago, I was pretty much forced to move here.
Lisa Belisle: That’s kind of unfortunate! It’s an unfortunate way to have to come to a state.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right, yeah, so to be completely honest, when people always ask, “How did you choose Maine?” I would have never chosen Maine on my own. It was sort of like, you’re a mother, you need to do what’s best for your children, you go where you have to go.
Lisa Belisle: All right. Now you’re here.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: I am here!
Lisa Belisle: It must have been an interesting journey for you.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: It was quite an interesting journey in that it really just flipped my whole life upside down in terms of everything that I was planning on doing. Prior to moving to Maine, all of my work had been in social services, primarily working with homeless people in Chicago. I was program director of a couple different homeless shelters, and that was really my focus, working with low-income homeless people. I grew up working class, so definitely had quite an affinity for how to help people.
Moving here just changed all of that! I did that for a number of years, but certain things just unfolded the longer I was here, and it was like, “Oh, okay, I guess I’m going to be doing different work now.”
Lisa Belisle: You chose … Well, working with homeless people, that’s difficult just to start with. How did that grab you? What was your intention when you first started in that field?
Shay Stewart-Bouley: A lot of it had to do with my own childhood. There was about a six month period when my parents were homeless. Thankfully, we met many great people along the way. I was about 10 or 11 at that time, and I never forgot those people and what that work meant to me, and just thinking about services for homeless people in this country have really deteriorated over, I would say, the past several decades, so I felt a really strong affinity to give back. It just made a lot of sense, it worked really well. Homeless shelters have really interesting hours when you’re raising children because they’re open at night time, so my first job was doing the third shift at a homeless shelter. It was work that I just had a natural fit for.
Lisa Belisle: Most people don’t have a natural fit for working in that field.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Well, I mean, I was able to understand our clients really well, and just understand, “Well, there’s so many reasons why people become homeless, and especially people with children.” For me, it was really, again, a way to just give back. When you’re a child and you’re thinking about what do you want to be when you grow up, working with the homeless is not on that list. My daughter, who’s 12, will often ask me, “What did you want to be when you wanted to grow up?” I actually wanted to be either an actor or an attorney. I am neither of those things, though I did study theater for a number of years in Chicago, up until the point at which I moved here, when I was close to about 30. I would often take improv classes in my 20s. I’m sure it’s a really good skill to have given that I talk a lot, but I’m neither an actor nor an attorney.
Lisa Belisle: But you have created something that’s really important, and probably the experiences that you’ve had in acting and in speaking have really contributed positively to that.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Oh yeah! I mean, I definitely would say that those experiences … I’m a person who I feel every experience that I have, it’s just a building block, it builds on top of something else that I do. Most certainly what I’ve created in terms of my work with Black Girl in Maine, which actually started off as a joke. In 2008, I, like many people, got caught up in the economic crash and started working with a life coach, and was trying to figure out, “What do I want to do with my life?” I always wanted to write, but I’m not the greatest writer. At that time, I was still doing some writing for the Portland Phoenix here, but I was really feeling hemmed in by the limitations of writing a regular column in a publication where it was like I had 600 words and I had all these things I wanted to say.
My daughter at the time was three, and working with the life coach, one of her suggestions was, “What if you start a blog?” At the time, the mommy blogging thing was really big, I had a three year old and a 16 year old, so I thought, “Great! I’ve got tons of years of parenting experience, let’s write about my kids.” Even the name of the blog is a joke because I told my then-husband, “Yeah, I should call it Black Girl in Maine.” He goes, Why don’t you call it Black Girl in Maine? I thought, “I don’t know, it sounds kind of weird to call your blog Black Girl in Maine.” But then I thought, well, that’s actually reflective of who I am, so let’s call it Black Girl in Maine!
In the earlier years, I would say 2008 to probably about 2012, I did do a lot of postings around parenting, specifically through the lens of raising black children in Maine. However, one of the things I discovered with blogging with focusing on parenting is that your children get to a certain age where you can’t really write about them. Given that I started the blog when my son was 16, he was sophomore, junior in high school at that time, he was pretty good-natured about me writing about a lot of stuff. But when he went to college, it became really clear that his stories weren’t really my stories to tell anymore, and so I started to have a shift in terms of writing more about race, especially as I started seeing things more through a racialized lens in terms of understanding how Maine operates and why it’s so white. It really was just this natural … There was no thought to it, there was no game plan. It just sort of … Where the blog is now was never part of my life plan, it just sort of happened.
Lisa Belisle: What did you learn? Why is Maine so white? How does Maine operate? Having lived here all my life, it’s harder for me to see what somebody who’s more objective can see.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Well, in part because white Americans in general, and it’s not just Maine, operate in what I call the “silo of whiteness.” I should probably backtrack a little bit. One of my degrees, I have an undergraduate degree in African-American Studies, so I understand a lot about history as it relates to African-American people and understanding that a lot of history that’s taught in our school systems actually is pretty whitewashed.
Maine operates in what I call a silo of whiteness. There are a number of reasons that it’s not an attractive place for people of color to live. There’s the economic component. I know that one of the things that was hard for me moving here, I started graduate school when I was here, and I went to graduate school in New Hampshire, which is looking at the economic difference in terms of salaries, and thinking, “Why are the salaries so much lower here?” That’s partly why I actually have a job that’s based in Boston.
I think that just the culture itself, it’s very insular, it’s very, very much a New Englandy type of place. That’s my made-up word there, “New Englandy.” I don’t think it’s really warm and receptive to newcomers. That most certainly was my experience for many, many years.
I also think that the culture here is very polite in the sense that people don’t really ever go deep in their conversations. One of my biggest pet peeves of living here is how surface people are. Do we really care about the Patriots or the Red Sox or the weather, which is my biggest pet peeve? I hate talking about weather. Of all the things in the world that I can talk about, talking about the weather seems like a waste of time for me because guess what? I can’t change the weather! It’s funny to me because Mainers are very territorial about their weather. It’s like, well, I’ve lived in the Midwest and traveled through a good chunk of the United States. The weather is just what the weather is.
Lisa Belisle: You are entering into a conversation with someone and they’re asking you yet again to talk about the weather or the Red Sox or the Patriots, but you’d prefer to talk about something else. How do you move in that direction?
Shay Stewart-Bouley: It actually depends on who I’m talking to. Some people you can just kind of gauge, they’re not going to want to go deeper with you because a lot of times, people aren’t comfortable having deeper conversations. You look at where we are in this country right now, and it feels like every conversation is off-limits in the sense that people don’t like to talk about politics, they don’t want to talk about race. It’s really funny because in this moment as we’re recording this, thinking about the past couple weeks in this nation and some of the things that have been going on with the administration and then circling around race, and yet most of us in our day to day conversations that are the passing conversations, never do we actually say, “So what do you think about this whole me thing?” What are your thoughts on it?” People don’t have the language, I think, in many cases, specifically white people, to have those conversations.
A big part of it is how, I would say, white folks are socialized. I think a lot of folks, depending on the generation that they come from, probably starting from Generation X down, “Well, we shouldn’t talk about race because it’s not nice,” but the fact is, if we don’t talk about race, we allow certain attitudes and stereotypes to continue to self-perpetuate. If there’s one thing that came out of what happened in Charlottesville to me that stood out was that these were younger white people. These were not your grandfather’s generation of racists. These were younger people. How does someone in their 20s and 30s in this day and age harbor those types of views? Probably because they were raised in a family where nobody talked about race.
More importantly, if you operate in what I call that silo of whiteness, most of the people that you’re around are just like you, so you never actually have to confront any type of difference. You don’t have a vocabulary to do that. It’s sort of a fertile ground for just letting whatever grow in terms of the weeds and that starts to choke people’s humanity.
Lisa Belisle: Why are things off-limits? Why have we gotten to this place where people are so concerned about what they say that they can’t say anything at all?
Shay Stewart-Bouley: I think to some degree, we’ve always been that way. I think, what were the big ones that people used to never talk about? Religion, politics, money, sex. We just continued that culture, which is rather ironic to me, given that we live in the age of Facebook and people can just go online and share whatever, but in our face to face encounters, we don’t feel comfortable having those conversations.
A lot of my work, frankly, is about getting people to work through that discomfort, getting them to the point of, “If I talk about race” or we acknowledge that, oh, that is a black person or that is an Asian person, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, we should never be colorblind because being colorblind doesn’t help anything either. Really being able to feel comfortable naming things and understanding that naming something is not being against it or being racist.
I think part of it’s just the culture that we’ve all been raised in, and that if we’re not intentional and we don’t say with intention, “You know what? We’re done with that, we’re going to start talking,” it just continues.
Lisa Belisle: Let’s start with naming. This is something that I think a lot of people struggle with. We don’t want to step wrong into a space where we say, “This is the name of a person of color,” because even that, we might get called racist for.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Well, and it’s interesting that you say that, because frankly, that is such a … It’s, again, a very white American mindset. I feel like white people, they’re more bothered about being called a racist than they are in terms of actually engaging in racist behavior. That’s hard. I mean, you’ve just got to get over that. It really is, I’m sorry, you’ve got to buck up and just get over it and realize that naming something is not racist. Racism is a system.
I use the academic definition of racism, which is power and privilege. You look at who holds power and privilege in this country, and the vast majority of power and privilege, it’s held by white people. I think that for white people, when they look at racism, they’re looking at it from an interpersonal personal perspective and not looking at the structure of racism, not looking in their own communities and going, “Gee, I’ve never really thought about it. Why are all the teachers in my community white? Why are all the police officers in my community white? What does that mean if there are families of color or folks of color in my community and all the systems and structures are made up of white people?” Because if you don’t have different people at the table, you most certainly are going to continue to perpetuate well-meaning, yet racist behaviors.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that we have talked about … At Maine Magazine, we’re all white.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Why are you all white? I guess I would ask that.
Lisa Belisle: First of all, I don’t know why we’re all white. I think probably because, and I’m not the person who does the hiring, but we haven’t had a lot of people who have been … Would you prefer person of color, black? What would you …
Shay Stewart-Bouley: I’m black.
Lisa Belisle: You’re black, okay.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: I can’t, I don’t speak for people of color, but I’m black, and I’m black American.
Lisa Belisle: Okay, so say black Americans. We just haven’t had that many people who are black American, for whatever reason, come to the magazine to want to work here. We all happen to be white, and yet we also would like to be inclusive and we would like to cover people who are black and of other … I’m trying to talk in a really awkward way, so you know that I’m coming from my own silo of whiteness here. I acknowledge that.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: No, I can tell. I’m looking at your body language. I can tell that given everything that you do, that this is probably like, “Wow, I’m having a moment where I’ve got to think a little bit about this,” and I can tell it’s probably not a regular conversation that you have.
Lisa Belisle: No, it’s incredibly difficult, because I don’t want to say anything that is insulting or wrong.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right.
Lisa Belisle: But I really do want to engage in this conversation, because I think about trying to be inclusive, and sometimes when we’re trying to be inclusive, it ends up being more token-ism.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right, and you definitely-
Lisa Belisle: And that’s even worse!
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right, and you definitely don’t want to do that. But I’ll just say the flip side of this, and just thinking about the structure of this publication. When I first moved to Maine, I spent years trying to read all the different magazines that were Maine-based, different publications and I know at one point, this publication came across my desk. I thought, “Wow, it’s glossy, it’s put together well, there are no people in it that reflect me, why the hell would I keep buying this?” Thinking about, well, if everybody who works here is white, then that impacts, to some degree, what you put out and continues that circle of never really being inclusive.
And then, thinking about well, why are there no people who are of color who work here, and probably a big part of it is when you think about how people are often hired, a lot of times it’s through friends, it’s through word of mouth. If everybody in our circles are always white, again, it becomes harder to bring on people of difference. That would probably be one reason that the publication really hasn’t shifted in terms of the racial demographics, or I would say the management would probably need to make a concerted effort and say, “You know what? We really want to be intentional about changing the demographics here, and that requires stretching a little bit in terms of…”
I’m sure there are plenty of well-qualified people of color to work at a publication. Just as a little side note, 23 years ago I worked at a magazine in Chicago, so I’ve actually worked on magazines. It was funny because at that time, even in Chicago, there weren’t that many people of color. But thinking again for me, what are our hiring practices? Do we create an environment that would feel welcoming, or do we expect the one person of color that we bring into our space to fit into our way of doing things without thinking about, is this a culture in a space that’s accepting and tolerant of all? I really hate to use the word “tolerant” because “tolerance” annoys me. We tolerate Brussels sprouts. In many cases, we don’t like them.
Lisa Belisle: If we’re in this place where we would like to have people who are black Americans or really any other type of race and just be more inclusive, but we’re still in Maine and we’re still trying to figure out how to be intentional and reach out to people, that’s not always easy.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: No, it’s not easy, and again, that’s why I often come back to the word “intentional” because honestly, you do have to be intentional and you are going to have to stretch and you are going to have to reach in terms of, “Okay, I’m going to have to put some effort into this.” We really are going to have to think about how to do this. You’re right. Otherwise, if you expect that it’s going to change without putting in extra energy, it’s not going to change.
Lisa Belisle: Let’s assume that we would like to be more inclusive, not only in the hiring, but also in the coverage that we have. We actually are actively trying to do this and be intentional. Do you have suggestions? How would you suggest that we go about being more inclusive?
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Well, one of the things that I would suggest, and I know there are other publications in the area that have reached out to me. I should probably mention, I am a contributor myself to the Portland Phoenix, but I know that in the past year or so, the Phoenix has really made an effort to bring on other writers of color. I think for over ten years I was the only writer of color, and now there are multiple writers of color. Even the writers themselves who are permanent, they are doing more work in terms of developing their own knowledge around anti-racism work.
I would say that’s a really big first step in terms of if an organization is committed to making that change, “Okay, maybe we need to do some work as an organization around creating an anti-racism lens through which we do our work.” In that case, I would say bring in an outside consultant, figure out, “Okay, let’s look at all of our hiring practices,” but also, let’s start with ourselves because ultimately every system is made up of people. We talk about criminal justice system or whatever. I always remind people, “But who’s in that system? Who makes the actual decisions? People.” Those are the people that you really have to affect. You have to get them to start having a shift in how they view the world.
I think once an organization makes that commitment, and it’s been fascinating to me in the past year, that in New England in general, more and more organizations that have always been predominantly white are starting to realize they do have to do that work. Typically, again, it does start with the conversations, it starts with definitely leadership taking the lead. It’s really hard to affect that kind of change from the bottom up. I think in order for it to really feel like the organization is committed, it has to come from the top down.
Lisa Belisle: I mean, what you’re talking about, I think, is important and I know that my daughter who’s in college who’s a senior, we have conversations about this. She talks about gender. Gender is her big focus. Obviously, she’s also white, so this is just the direction that she’s gone in. Even that is really difficult. It’s really hard to affect change and help people move their lens with regard to gender.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Right.
Lisa Belisle: We have plenty of women working at this magazine and we have plenty of women who are represented on its pages.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: But again, if you’re making that change, where is it starting from? Is it starting from the middle, is it starting from the bottom, or is the commitment starting from the top down, where everyone says, “Okay, let’s look at everything here. We’re going to look at the gender roles, look at everything in terms around gender. Where is it starting?” Really, I think, putting an intensive lens on it to say, “This is what we want to do.”
Lisa Belisle: What I’m getting from this is it’s not an easy fix. It’s work to be done and it’s intentional.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: This is a country … Well, I mean, when you think about this historically, this is a country that has never had a major dialogue on race. This is a country that still owes a lot to Native Americans and black folks in this country given our history, and we’ve never really acknowledged that. When you actually think about the civil rights movement, I think people have this really glossy sort of, “Oh, that happened so long ago.”
Last year it was interesting for me. I did a Ted Talk, and in preparing for my Ted Talk, I spent a lot of time talking to my father who grew up under Jim Crow in the South, and realizing that the last laws that were really taken off the books with regards to Jim Crow were taken off the books less than ten years before I was born in the late 1960s. We really aren’t that far along as a nation when it comes to dealing with race because you still have then the generational effects. My father grew up having to go to segregated high schools because it was illegal for him to go to an integrated high school. He grew up drinking from that colored water fountain. Then, when you look at other factors like the education piece, the economic piece, and you realize, “Wow, there’s still people grappling with that,” but yet, we’ve never had a dialogue beyond that as a nation.
We talk about it in how we teach our kids, “Well, we had the civil rights movement,” there was MLK … Which is always fascinating to me, because most people when they think about his words, they only look at the really pretty words, the ones that make people feel good. They don’t talk about the ones where he said white progressives are really not doing their job. Then we, of course, from the MLK days, we skip to what I call the Obama days and how we instantly wanted to label that post-racial. It’s like, “Oh my God! We’ve elected our first black president! We’re so beyond race.” But I would say the events of the past year-plus are showing us clearly we didn’t go beyond race because we went from our first black president to a man who doesn’t want to engage on a deeper level around race.
All of these things to me are just indicators of how much more work we actually have to do. Again, you live in Maine. It is, to some degree, easy to avoid that work, because it’s easy to go, “Well, there are no people of color. I don’t have any work to do.” But the thing is, the work doesn’t require people of color to be involved in the process at all. The work actually requires white people to start thinking critically around whiteness and thinking about “What does it mean to be white in this country?” I mean going beyond Peggy McIntosh’s checklist of “My White Privileges,” but to really think about “What has been bestowed upon me by virtue of my skin color, and how do I create equity and equality moving forward so that we can get out of this system?”
Lisa Belisle: Well, I’m glad that you are putting all this energy into it because I think it’s really important. Even if this is just the beginning of a dialogue that you and I are having about this, I hope people who are listening will think about themselves and also think about their own place within this larger structure that you have been describing.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: I think, and I will just … Because I give this resource to everyone and should mention she’s a colleague of mine and a collaborator. But, there is a fantastic book that any white person who hears this and is thinking, “I have no idea what this woman is talking about, I am not racist.” There’s a book by a writer by the name of Debbie Irving. The book’s called Waking Up White. Debbie is now in her 50s, yeah, Debbie’s in her 50s, but in her late 40s, she started a process of as she calls it, really waking up. She had grown up fairly wealthy, fairly privileged in New England. Never really thought about race, had done some work I think in Cambridge with communities of color, but never really felt connected.
Through a class that she ended up taking when she was in a graduate program, it really made her start to look at race critically and launched her into this whole journey of discovering herself and looking at race, but then looking more critically at the structures which uphold whiteness and racism in terms of housing and redlining in this country, and why so many people in this country live in racially segregated areas and understanding the role that the federal government played. Understanding that World War Two, what came out of World War Two was the creation of basically the white middle class. Well, why was only the white middle class created? Why was there not a black middle class created? In part because the black GIs often, when they came back to the States, were not able to take advantage of the benefits that had been promised to them in terms of being able to go to school in order to access the low interest loans. Everything that helped to create the white middle class did not create the black middle class, in part because the federal laws helped to uphold certain systems.
That’s the work I would say that white people need to do. When you understand that, it becomes easier to go a little bit deeper and to push a little bit harder and to really, as I call it, become a troublemaker.
Lisa Belisle: All right! Well, I will read that book.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Great!
Lisa Belisle: Yes. I’ve been speaking with Shay Stewart-Bouley, who is the executive director of Community Change, a nearly 50 year old anti-racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. She is also the creator of the well-known blog Black Girl in Maine. Thank you for having this conversation with me.
Shay Stewart-Bouley: Thank you for having me!
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Lisa Belisle: Malcolm Gauld has been president of Hyde School, a private boarding school focused on character education, since 1998, and recently became executive chairman. Laura Gauld is now president of Hyde School, and she runs the school. Thanks for coming in today.
Laura Gauld: Thank you.
Malcolm Gauld: Thanks for having us.
Lisa Belisle: It probably goes without saying, but you are married to each other.
Laura Gauld: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Malcolm Gauld: Yes.
Laura Gauld: And parents.
Lisa Belisle: And parents of three children?
Laura Gauld: Three grown.
Lisa Belisle: Three grown children.
Laura Gauld: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in the work that you’ve been doing, really for multiple decades now with the Hyde School, because your school has become really known at least around the country, maybe around the world, for the type of education that it offers. It’s unique.
Laura Gauld: It’s very unique. Actually the original campus which is here in Bath, Maine, was founded by Malcolm’s father, Joseph Gauld, and that was a little over 50 years ago. He basically started with a hypothesis, if you focused on character, would achievement follow? That was what he set out to test. Then later, in the mid-’70s, we realized that if you want to reach the deepest part of kids, there’s two big influencers. You have the parents and you have the peer group. We were covering the peer group, but then we had to engage the parents.
Really, I would say the two big differentials at Hyde is character development, not just poster on the wall, but real character development, and then parent involvement. Parent engagement, parent growth as the most important role models for the students.
Lisa Belisle: How old are your children now?
Laura Gauld: Do you know or do you want me?
Malcolm Gauld: I know, I think!
Laura Gauld: Okay good, let’s test!
Malcolm Gauld: 27, 25, and 23.
Lisa Belisle: So as I was reading this book, The Biggest Job We’ll Ever Have, which was published in 2001, written by both of you, and I was reading some older stories about, I believe, a daughter who was giving some difficulty at the age of four with potty training.
Laura Gauld: Oh yes, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa Belisle: That was a few years ago, then.
Laura Gauld: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yes.
Malcolm Gauld: Many.
Laura Gauld: She was our feisty, take no prisoners, spirited child. Not to put labels, but she tend to do that. At 27, she is still feisty, take no prisoners, spirited, but I’ve learned along the day what to take hold of and what to let go of. Because I think where that potty training story was the beginning of my issue as her mother trying to control her. The more I tried to control her, the more difficult it got. What I learned going through this parent program and learning some of these things that we talk about was focus on myself. Not try to seek her love, and just let go of any guilt that you feel and just focus on what I needed to do.
Even today, I always preface … Even when she came home, I said … You know, something was going on, and I see that she’s got to deal with something, and I was like, “Would you like any input?” She was like, “Oh, I know what you’re going to say.” It’s like, “Okay, I don’t need to say it, honey. It’s your life.” Of course, when I let go, next thing you know, she’s like, “No, I do want to hear what you have to say.”
I think the essence of our kids when they’re born, the spirit of our kids is all unique. She tested me in a way that no other human being has ever tested me in my life. Not even my own mother. This child was put on this earth to help me be a better person, and I love her dearly.
Lisa Belisle: You weren’t entirely sure that you wanted to be a teacher. Is that right, Malcolm?
Malcolm Gauld: I thought I wanted to do it for a little while, a couple years, maybe. I started out in the late ’70s and I was, oh, I don’t know, going to go to law school or something like that. Then I think what happens to a lot of us teachers is I got hooked on it after a while. I did spend some time in the business world in my late 20s, but found that working with kids, I’m not looking at my watch, I’m not wondering what time it is. I found myself thoroughly engrossed in it, and so that’s what I’ve been doing now for 40 years.
Lisa Belisle: You started out at Hyde School also.
Malcolm Gauld: I went to Hyde School.
Lisa Belisle: You went to Hyde School before you went on to Bowdoin and then Harvard.
Malcolm Gauld: Yes. The joke in our family is Joe Gauld had to start a school so his son would have a place to go. I went there for four years myself and had a huge impact on me. I think many things are different today about the school, but the core is still the same. That is the focus on character development and unique purpose in life. Those two things together. Character is often viewed … It’s talked about a lot today in America, but it’s talked about I think as an end in itself, whereas we believe that it is the key to your destiny, and we need to develop our character if we’re going to be the special, unique person we were meant to be. I think that’s what we’re trying to do.
I mean, the whole time I’ve been an educator, for 40 years, I’ve heard about this thing called education reform, okay? I even remember my parents talking about it when I was a little kid. It makes you wonder, when does this thing actually kick in? When do we actually do this thing called reform? What we believe is that there’s a fundamental flaw in our schooling system in our country, and that flaw, we believe, is we care more about what they can do than about who they are, and they know it. I’m talking about the kids in America. We’re focused on what they can do. We’re not focused on who they are.
What we try to do at Hyde, I think what we were trying to do then and what we’re trying to do now is focus on who you are.
Laura Gauld: Right, and I think what we’ve found is if you get kids to focus on what they can control. There’s really only three things: their attitude, how much effort they put in, and their character. Most kids are going to do pretty well.
Malcolm Gauld: They’re going to also achieve.
Laura Gauld: They’re going to have achievement, and you know, achievement’s important. We don’t want our kids sitting on the couch and not showing up for life. But the overemphasis on achievement, and of course the biggest change I’ve seen is the parent involvement, the parent enmeshment, the parent desperately needing friendship with our kids.
You think on when we were raised, my stepfather had no interest in a relationship with me. He had his own friends. He didn’t want … He no more cared about whether or not we were having a conversation. He was raising me, and thank goodness. And yet, with our own kids, I got offtrack because I wanted a relationship with them. Then I see even more today.
The biggest change is how to help the parents. How to help the adults in this culture get back to … Giving them the help that they need. I also think we have a culture too, where unless you have a huge problem, you don’t ask for help. You’ve got to figure it out. Sometimes the people who really have the big problems, they sometimes get liberated because they get to ask for help.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve done a series of workshops called Biggest Job, and they’re all about parenting. One of the things that I was struck by was the raft experiment, where you created a raft made out of tape, I guess, on the floor, and then you asked someone to step on the raft and try to keep the raft balanced as if it were really in the water, and then you successively added more people to that raft as though they were part of a family, and asked people to observe what the dynamic was as you added more people to that. It really made me think about how, as a family, we can get pulled off course if we don’t understand that you can have one person on the raft who’s creating a lot of disturbance, and then you can have somebody else on the raft who’s doing most of the work to keep it balanced. That’s something that I don’t, as we become parents, we’re just trying to keep them alive at first, and then over time, sometimes we don’t even recognize that family dynamics have gotten distorted.
Laura Gauld: Right, and what we try to say in that exercise, it’s so … You’re right to pick that out, because that is such a visual for people, because everybody can relate to some role on that raft. But the point of that exercise is you’ve got to ask yourself, “What’s at the center of our family? Is it fuzziness? Is it confusion?” Because you’re often bringing different people together from different upbringings. Is it a person? If that person’s having a good day, we’re all having a good day. Or, is it a set of principles? What are your values? What are your go-to things? What are you all about?
What we learned is anytime we had … I’m thinking any time we had an issue with our kids, it was usually we’re not aligned with our principles. It really wasn’t the kids’ behavior. That was the alarm. The other thing that raft exercise shows … We ask kids and we ask adults, “How many of you have ever been at the center of the raft?” Lots of people play that role. Then you have the person you just add, and you say to them, “You take whatever role you feel you need to take and then you get out of the way.” A lot of times, there are kids in a family who are flying under the radar. They might be smoking pot, they’re just smoking it in the basement not out on the back porch, where the rebel is smoking it. Nobody’s challenging them because they might be achieving. They might be compliant.
Then you have the primary raft balancer, which was me, it’s a lot of moms. It’s not always the mom, so I don’t want to go gender here, but a lot of times it is. It was me. I was the primary raft balancer, and in some ways, I pushed my husband out, and then I had to realize, “Wait a minute. We’re not even working as a team. I’m upset with him for not stepping up, but I’ve given him no place to step up.”
The raft is a great way for everybody to say, “All right. Where are we? Where do we want to go? What shifts do we all have to make?” Because at the end of the day, when you make a shift … You can never fix a person in your family, but when you make a shift, you create an opening.
Malcolm Gauld: I’d also add that one thing I’ve noticed over the last 40 years is the line of who’s responsible for what has really maybe never been as blurred as it is now. I’ll give you an example. I remember it was around this time of my senior year in high school when we were having dinner at home one night, and my mother turned to me and said, “So what are you doing about that college thing, anyway?” I outlined that I was looking at some schools, and I even picked a … I picked a strategy where I applied to four really competitive schools where I could have easily been rejected at all of them, and my mother heard my strategy and she said, “Well, that doesn’t sound like a very good strategy. You ought to have some fallbacks, and you ought to …” She threw in.
But she also said, “But it’s your life, good luck.” I don’t know many parents today that handle it that way. The parents are very engaged, right into helping write the essay and making … There is an engagement that I don’t think is right, and I think it went from being too much my problem to the parent owning way too much of it. I think that’s maybe a metaphor for a lot of what we’re seeing now, and I think that raft exercise can help sort that out too, of who’s responsible for what.
Lisa Belisle: I think it can be hard if you are the parent who is maybe giving your child more responsibility to see that you’re a little bit alone in this when you look around and all the other parents are hiring college coaches and they’re taking their kid to 20 different schools around the country starting their sophomore year. As a parent and even as a child who’s observing this, it can be hard to stand your ground, somewhat.
Laura Gauld: Well, you’ve, again, you think about when we had the neighborhood growing up. There were lots of norms that some of them were just … They were unspoken norms, but they were norms. If you were out of line, any parent could discipline you. You accepted that, you knew your parents would do that. I know when we raised our kids, even in Maine, small town, there were people who were like, “Don’t talk to my kid.” We tried to set the example, but there is a little bit, you’re right, this fear in the achievement race that if you let go and step back, your child may lose their place in line.
What is part of my mission in life is really more than even working at a school. It’s helping parents realize that the greatest gift you can give your kids is to let go of the achievement and focus on the character. Set an example of always reinventing yourself, always growing, always changing. Then you can sit back. It doesn’t mean the problems go away, but I feel like now we’re getting some of the payback as our grown kids, they’re no longer kids, but they’re always going to be my kids, are adults. I am so proud of them. They have issues. They have successes, they have failures. They’re not my trophy case, they belong to them. I get to now, luckily they want us in their lives, and that’s a wonderful thing.
We had to, like you say, you have to roll that dice. I’ve seen people where, kids that were pushed on the achievement track, and they got into the great schools, and they fell apart down the road of life because they never knew how to fail. They never took a risk. Again, we still try to help those people because we say, “Hey, you’re a great person and you’re failing, so what are you going to do? Pick yourself up, deal with it.” But you’re absolutely right.
We have to put the weight of our foot somewhere as a society, and you even see what’s going on today with the sexual harassment and all that. I think as a culture, maybe we are seeing, “Let’s look at this through the character lens, not the political lens.” Well, I think it’s the same thing as parenting. Let’s view our kids through the character lens, and if we do that, especially if you have high expectations, your kids are going to achieve. The great thing about their achievements is they won’t be achievements you did that they never really get the confidence from. Because, as Mal said, you paved the way. You called that school. You got them in there. You wrote the excuse. You minimized that. They’re not going to feel, they’re not going to have the great confidence that comes from that achievement if it’s not theirs.
Lisa Belisle: One of the stories that you told, Malcolm, was about a soccer team that you were the coach of. It was a group of girls who weren’t really taking themselves seriously. They weren’t winning any games, but that wasn’t even the problem. The problem was that they weren’t showing up in their scrimmage outfits, their practice outfits. They were bringing their purses and the makeup and there was a lot of, I guess, inattention to the reason why they were on a soccer team. And so rather than preach at them, you just said, “Listen. This is a soccer team. We’re going to act like a soccer team.” It’s almost like an “act as if.” Maybe you’re not going to win, it’s completely fine.
Malcolm Gauld: Move the body and the mind will follow a little bit, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Exactly. Then by maybe the second season, they were actually asking for additional opportunities to do winter soccer, and they were actually starting to win. You weren’t browbeating them. It wasn’t about your ego and whether they won or not. It was make it possible for them to engage in the behavior that might lead them to success, which is important.
Malcolm Gauld: Well, and I had been an athlete and played sports in college and had taken it very seriously. It was a big part of my life, and so here I had these kids who weren’t looking at it that way. I had coached kids who were, so I had had that too. I think one of the things we do at Hyde that’s unique is we like to say that we don’t have extracurricular activities, everything’s cocurricular. Everybody does academics, everyone does athletics, everyone does performing arts and community service. We test ourselves in a wide variety of ways. You’re going to probably do some things you’re good at, you’re going to do some things you’re not good at. Everyone’s going to see you do both.
First, we don’t look at something like soccer as an add-on, as an extracurricular activity. We view it, that’s a character-building opportunity. That’s what we did there. It wasn’t … I mean, winning is fun and we like to do that, but we’re going to … Let’s be the best we can be. Let’s be the best soccer team we can be, with what we have. That first season, that meant zero wins and eight losses, and I remember we scored a goal around the fourth game and the kids were jumping up and down like we’d won the Superbowl or something.
It taught me something about, that you take the kids where they are, and I think, and build from there. I think that’s true in academics, too. I mean, one of the things that I like to do is I’ll often run a school meeting where I’ll ask the question, “How many of you have been told that you’re bright kids who don’t apply yourself?” Every hand goes up. I like to tweak them a little bit and go, “Well, sorry to tell you, but it’s not true.” They go, “What do you mean?” I go, “Some of you aren’t bright. I’m not going to name any names, but.”
That’s the way we look at it in this country and we’ve done that that way for a while. Our first priority is how bright the person is or how bright the person is not, and we generally don’t even talk about that. If someone’s not bright, we just don’t tell them. But, what we try to do is forget about that, let’s just work hard and see what happens. Let’s put the effort first, rather than how …
The thing that’s encouraging is so many people out there, like Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck and Paul Tuff are kind of coming around to that idea. As Carol Dweck says, if you praise kids for working hard, they’ll work hard in tough times and try to rise to the top. If you praise them for being bright, they will avoid challenges where they don’t look good because they want you to say that to them and they’ll think that if they don’t do well, they’re not bright. It’s encouraging, actually, to see our culture maybe coming around to that.
Lisa Belisle: I completely agree with this idea that we are focusing so much on achievement and external things being motivators for kids, whether it’s getting into the right college, whether it’s winning the right championship, whether it’s scoring the right scores on your SATs. Specifically, I think about kids in high school athletics. You’re on this track for such a long time, and then I will often see as patients people who have, they’ve reached the end of the road, and there’s nothing external to achieve anymore. There’s a sense of emptiness, and some people even get very depressed about it. By setting people up with a certain structure when they’re younger, you’re really putting them at a disadvantage when they’re older.
Malcolm Gauld: An example that I’d give on that, this is maybe one of my latest harangues, maybe, is I’ve had a lifelong love of athletics. I still play, we call it geezer lacrosse and old man basketball and stuff like that. Here I am, in my 60s, and looking back over my athletic life, most of the athletics I played were on a field unsupervised by adults. There was a ball out there and you picked up teams, you settled disputes, it was not adult-controlled. And now, the athletes that I see, including our own children who were involved in this, very much travel teams, adult-controlled. The adults determine the playing time. At the end, I don’t know if they’re going to love it as much, if they don’t have that experience. Maybe we’re doing a little too much of that, not just in athletics, but in other endeavors as well.
Laura Gauld: I think I would add to that that, like anything, whether it’s sports, whether your achievements came through music or through an academic field, at the end of the day, if you don’t have the great confidence in yourself, if you’re getting your confidence from some exterior decision, you think … You have to help people, teach them to be lifelong learners. Yeah, it’s tough. You’re no longer an elite athlete, or you’re no longer at the top of your game here. But I think we’ve always tried to encourage the adults in our communities, the parents and the teachers. We’re doing character here, so you’ve got to keep working on your unique potential. You have to keep changing.
We just had an in-service day with all of the adults, and the whole focus was challenging each other to where do you need to reinvent yourself. Where are you feeling stale? Why are we doing that? We’re doing that to be role models for the kids. In fact, you end up … Like you say, there’s always juncture points in your life. It’s hard when your kids don’t need you anymore. It’s hard when they go to their first job, when you realize, “That’s it!” Yeah, you’ve got to cry a little, and then you’ve got to pick yourself up, you’ve got to reinvent yourself, and you’ve got to move to the next thing.
I think you have a better chance of doing that if you’ve experienced the joys of some failure and some struggle, as well as … It’s wonderful to win championships and succeed, but those girls on that team, and I remember, because we were young teachers back then. Those girls on that team continue to talk about that season because they reinvented themselves as athletes. Some of them went on to play in college. Others didn’t, but they looked back on that. That was a benchmark for them.
Lisa Belisle: There’s a … I think it was a set of nine different things that you had talked-
Laura Gauld: Ten.
Lisa Belisle: Ten different things … That makes more sense, I guess. Ten is a more even number … That you talked about over the course of the book. One of the biggest ones was harmony versus truth, which I think is very important, because we have gotten into this strange society of niceness and wanting everything to be good and happy. That really has put us in a weird place, I think, as a culture. It does this in families as well.
Laura Gauld: That priority is number one. It’s truth over harmony. It’s trying to remind all of us at the end of the day, you put the weight of your foot in being truthful over the harmony. It’s, I think, the most important thing, and not just as a family, but in an organization and a school, a company. I will go back to a school, though, and a family. What happens is the kids don’t want to tell us the truth, and then as adults, we don’t want to know the truth. We say we want to know the truth, and we say, “Truth is the most important thing, this is the only thing, we’ll spank you.” We said all that.
But at the end of the day, the truth screws you up and the truth gets in the way of your plans, and then you’ve got to stop, drop, and deal, and then you’ve got to look like a circus act with the local town. We had all those things, where I’m like, “Oh my gosh, it’s blowing up in the restaurant. We wrote a book on parenting. Should we just dampen this down?” You have to then say, “Screw it.” Liberate yourself. It’s the same thing in an organization. I know almost on a daily basis when I deal with my colleagues, there’s always a thing in my head, “Okay, how honest are we going to be here? Are we going full honesty? Full frontal honesty? Or are we going to just go harmony here?”
Again, it’s not like you walk around telling everybody the truth, because that’s not a great-
Malcolm Gauld: It’s not truth instead of harmony.
Laura Gauld: That’s not a good thing in an organization, always.
Malcolm Gauld: Just over.
Laura Gauld: But you’re aware, at the end of the day. One of the things we have in the Hyde Organization with the adults is we are going to strive to put truth over harmony. So, if that appeals to you, if that appeals to you as an adult, we’re excited to have you here. If that’s something that you don’t really want to be a part of, that’s okay too. It’s just, this is our culture. And again, in our family, we try to say, “At the end of the day, guys, this is what we do. Even when it screws things up.”
Lisa Belisle: Well, I look forward to your next book or books. It sounds like there’s a few in the works, so we’ll see. Whenever those are out, I’ll make sure that I have a chance to read them. Good luck with those.
Laura Gauld: Great, thank you.
Malcolm Gauld: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Malcolm Gauld, who has been president of the Hyde School, a private boarding school focused on character education since 1998 and recently became executive chairman, and Laura Gauld, who is now the president of Hyde School and runs the school. They’re married with three children. Congratulations on successfully bringing them to adulthood.
Malcolm Gauld: Thanks!
Lisa Belisle: Thank you for all of the hard work that you’re doing in the state of Maine and being here today.
Laura Gauld: Great, thank you.
Malcolm Gauld: Thanks for having us.
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Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #328. Our guests have included Shay Stewart-Bouley and Malcolm and Laura Gauld. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit LoveMaineRadio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our enewsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.
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