Investing in Education
Setting the Example
by Amy Magin Wong
“I would like to see curiosity come back to education,” says
middle school teacher Sarah Mandanis, Ed.M.’94. “I think we
do such a long, hard job of draining and wringing the kids’ curiosity
right out of them that they’ve learned to just shut down
when they enter a classroom.”
Mandanis is doing her best to combat this lethargy in her seventh-grade language arts and social studies classes at the Windsor Middle School in Healdsburg, Calif. And fortunately, these efforts to ignite a passionate inquisitiveness in the learning process are strongly supported by her school’s administration. “My school has gone through dramatic changes,” she says, giving credit to her principal, who “praises the innovative and gives no energy to the dull.”
Mandanis’ desire to be a middle school teacher stems from her own personal experience, when she switched from a public school to a private one in seventh grade. “It was a crucial time in my education because I was doing very badly in the public school,” she says. The switch proved beneficial for Mandanis, who thrived in the new setting. She credits her success to the high expectations from both teachers — whom she describes as “unrelenting” — and her parents. These early lessons stayed with her and she has brought them forth into her own classroom. “I often talk to my kids about how it is a make-it-orbreak- it time in middle school. You have to decide that you are going to connect, and learn.”
She credits her father, Harvard Business School (HBS) alum Donald Gant, with installing a sense of the importance of education in her life. “He always had a strong, deeply held belief in education, above and before anything else,” she says. “We were always praised, not on appearance, but on intellectual ability and academic success.”
Gant, who has worked at Goldman Sachs in New York City for 53 years, says, “I have always been concerned that we are just not doing a good enough job in this country in the area of public education.”
Both he and his daughter regard the Harvard Graduate School of Education as playing a pivotal role in changing the current state of public school systems.
“I see HGSE as being more than just a school that educates teachers,” Gant says, “but as setting the example for the whole field of education; coming up with new ideas, turning out people who are not only going to go teach, but who will also eventually be leaders in turning education systems around.”
Mandanis adds, “It’s important to have a place where the bright minds and the earnest gather to contemplate education as the soul of society. What do we want to do, what are the problems, and is there a way to solve them?”
The Gant family has supported their strong faith in the goals of the Ed School with generous donations over the years. They have also established a fellowship at HBS that is geared toward students from the field of education who intend to become public school administrators.
Gant explains that the idea for the fellowship resulted from his experiences at HBS. “It has always been in a leadership role in business education, and that’s also how I see HGSE: as a beacon for others to follow in developing teachers, but also, in developing ‘education executives,’ who work to create firstclass school systems.”
“When you give money to an organization, it should fit into some overall philosophy that you have,” says Mandanis. “For me, it’s easy, knowing that the whole idea of HGSE is to enrich the lives of children through education.”
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Respond to this story with an e-mail to the editor.
— Amy Magin Wong is a freelance writer who lives in Massachusetts.
