Head of School Jonathan Downs '98, Convocation Ceremony 2024

When I would go to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City on weekends for ice hockey as a young boy, smoking was equally as prolific. It was not strange to see boys and girls with lighters and cigarettes in hand.

 

The summer after my 3^rd form year at Millbrook, 1995, I spent 3 weeks in Mexico City with my best friend from Prum. Fernando Nava. When I walked off the plane, there was no security back then—there was Fernando, smoking with the rest of the people in the airport. It was normal all over North America.

 

I have never smoked anything in my life. This cigarette [in tray] is fake if you haven’t already figured it out. I haven’t tried smoking, not because I’m holier than thou. I am no angel. Smoking just grossed me out. My parents earned a living by owning a restaurant. I worked there from a young age, and, at times, we pretty much lived there.  Back in the 80s and 90s, smoking in restaurants was always an option. “Smoking or non-smoking,” was what the hostess might ask you, as if the air could be divided. Despite advanced air filtration systems, my family and I would regularly arrive home with our hair, clothes, and skin reeking of smoke. So, I have never tried smoking because from an early age, I felt like I arrived home smelling nasty, and most of the time, there was nothing I could do about it.

 

My point is that smoking was simply normal for the first third of my life. There was nothing disrespectful about it. It was even advertised and widely regarded as cool.

 

Then, after years of data collection over multiple generations, there was a growing body of research that suggested smoking was bad. Correlations between smoking and negative health effects were drawn, and then those correlations became causations. Smoking was proven to cause lung disease, heart disease, skin cancer, thinning hair, and nail discoloration. Millions of people were addicted and couldn’t break the nicotine fix, even though they knew the potentially fatal effects of the habit. Worse, arguably far worse, secondhand smoke was proven to sometimes hurt and kill people who never smoked – people who just happened to be in close proximity of smokers.

 

With legislation and education, some scary commercials, law and government intervention, and healthy living campaigns, the smoke significantly cleared. We just don’t see cigarettes like we used to. They are around but on the endangered list for the betterment of mankind.

 

Call me dramatic, but now there is a growing body of research that suggests that cell phones are going to be something we look back upon in a similar way. Phones will be this generation’s cigarette. The damage phones will cause will not be as outwardly obvious as the physical threats of cigarettes. Worse, I think, they will be deeply internal, often hard to trace, threats to our spiritual and mental health. Depression. Loneliness. Anxiety. Mental fragility. Addiction. These often debilitating struggles and disorders will take the place of lung cancer, heart disease, and skin cancer. Some say they already have.

 

I have never felt a stronger moral obligation as an educator, a sense of duty and care, than to address this issue, our phone habits, with all of you. The question at the heart of the matter that I suggest we honestly face is, “Do we possess our phones, or do our phones possess us?”

 

I am no fool. Phones are not going anywhere. No one is dropping the gloves with Apple, Samsung, and Google at the moment. We are all most likely going to own phones for the rest of our lives. There are so many positives attached. These machines can be life-changing, remarkable tools that help us build efficiencies and connections from which we all benefit. I think of photo albums that capture so many wonderful moments and memories of the lives of my children, the facetimes with grandma from far away, crossy-road contests with my kids (a family favorite), or watching my daughter’s gymnastics meet when I could not be there in person. Maybe a favorite function for me is sitting down with an elder, relative, friend, or stranger, asking them what year they were 13-18 years old, scrolling through the Billboard top 25 songs in those years, and pulling them up on Spotify.

 

And yet, with the good comes the bad. A growing body of research warns us of the undeniably damaging and harmful effects of phones – especially for teenagers developing into adulthood, who biologically depend, grow, thrive, and survive on social interaction. That’s YOU.

 

Here are the 4 big harms, according to researcher Jonathan Haidt:

 

 

Sleep deprivation (There are more sleep studies and sleep aids than ever before in the history of mankind… because… sleep has declined in quantity and quality for smartphone users. With worse sleep comes a variety of effects, including depression, anxiety, lack of learning, and irritability, and we’re all prone to making more mistakes when we are tired.

 

Addiction. (Read Adam Alter’s Irresistible, Addictive Behaviors in Technology. Everything you interact with is meant to keep you hooked. Fun fact: the late and legendary CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, wouldn’t let his children have these devices because he and his team designed them to keep people hooked and addicted.

 

Attention fragmentation. (There are between 150-500 intentional interruptions from notifications, on average, on any given day. Since the beginning of this talk – (pull out). So few are important. Taylor Swift, or Harris/Trump, flash sale at Lululemon, a new color Stanley will make me feel better, or the next clever TikTok dance. When you do the math, if we permitted and paid attention to every notification, none of us would have more than a minute to think independently, much less interact with others without interruption). Almost never is something necessary to address in the moment. Just people, big business, and marketers trying to occupy our headspace with their thoughts, not ours. Consider this quotation from my favorite author and favorite book, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891.

 

“To influence a person is to take away his soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions…He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part not written for him. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. (when we are mindlessly influenced, our souls starve, and or courage dies).”

Wilde warns us to Be careful. Be very careful of the difference between information and influence.

 

At the moment, there is a collective movement in schools all over our country. 9 states have banned phones entirely in schools. Boarding Schools that you know, Deerfield, St Andrews, and Miss Porters, have put in “no phone zones” and “screen-free spaces,” leave it in your room policies in place, much like us. Other boarding schools have gone full-on summer camp mode. Don’t bring it at all. Tech free.

 

We’re not going summer camp, and yet we, the faculty, are convinced that what we are doing—leave it in your room during the academic day and keep the Flagler Memorial Chapel, Chelsea Morrison Theater, and Casertano Hall as no phone zones—is the right thing to do for you as individuals, and more importantly, for us as a community. We are going to rewire our habits. We are leaning into being a little more self-aware and a lot more present. We are going to have to help each other. We are not eliminating phones. We are regulating our self-discipline, and there’s no better place to regulate habits than with people who share similar values within a community. And if we all do it, we all help one another, we will all build better, healthier, habits for the future.

 

Some of you have asked me questions:

A few final thoughts:

 

Respect yourself. You are at Millbrook because of your hard work and your parents' desire for you to have an excellent education. Be at Millbrook. Don’t permit algorithms and bots to invade your time to think here, to be here, to interact here. Olympic Champion and 3-point GOAT Steph Curry loves the quote, “Be where your feet are.”

 

Respect others. Give all with whom you come in contact your undivided attention whenever possible. Please do not show us that whatever is hitting you up on the phone is more important. It’s not. Join Mr. Fietelson, Mr. Thom, and our faculty on a listening campaign.

 

Respect the community. The more you open yourself up to developing relationships here, the tighter your classes will bond, the more information you will retain, the more believable the work of the cast and crew will be, the more competitive our teams will be, and the more connected our Millbrook community will become.

 

The irony of it all is that which was designed to keep us connected has kept us disconnected. And if we work a little harder at connecting—here, together, with one another—I think we will graduate healthier, happier, smarter, more socially adjusted and adept, better rested, more focused thinkers. You will have a high school experience that only the lucky, privileged few will have,

 

My goal tonight was to give you all a sense of WHY we have made this shift. I have received 78 emails and counting from your parents thanking our faculty for building this habit of mind into our culture. I don’t read those emails as validation… I read them as an apology. We, the adults in your life, are struggling to guide you because we just didn’t know…

 

Millbrook and I, and I bet some of your parents would admit it, too… we have failed you in some ways. We are learning alongside you, from cigarettes to cell phones, and I believe it’s never too late to make a wrong right. By changing your habits now, I will confidently bet that you will become even better parents and educators than us someday... In the end, a better future is really what we're after, isn’t it?

 

Thank you for listening. Let’s have a great year.

 

Roll Stangs