What Endures When Everything is Changing
How we prepare students for a future we can't predict
Our daughters are deep in the college application process right now. We're writing essays about who they want to become, choosing schools based on programs that sound compelling, imagining majors and career paths. And the whole time, there's this question I can't shake: what exactly are we preparing them for?
They'll likely graduate college in 2030. They'll be building careers throughout the 2030s and 2040s. And I genuinely don't know what that world looks like. The jobs that seem stable now might not exist. The skills that feel essential might be automated. The tools they'll use haven't been invented yet.
This is personal for me in a way that goes beyond being a parent. As a technology director and teacher, I'm helping prepare students, from early childhood through eighth grade, for a future I can't clearly see. I'm watching both ends of this uncertainty: helping young learners build foundations while watching older students try to imagine their futures.
And AI is accelerating all of it. The timeline between "this matters" and "this is obsolete" keeps compressing.
So what do we actually teach when we can't predict what students will need?
The answer, I think, is agency as a genuine capability.
Agency means being someone who acts rather than waits to be acted upon. Someone who can set a direction, try things, learn from what doesn't work, and iterate toward what does. Someone who treats challenges as experiments rather than pass/fail tests. Someone who can extract principles from experience and adapt them to new situations.
When I look at our mission through this lens, I see it differently. Brookwood exists to foster "a joyful community of lifelong learners and upstanding global citizens who embrace a culture of curiosity, kindness, and academic accomplishment." That's not aspirational language. It's a description of agency.
Lifelong learners have agency over their own learning. They can set direction, acquire what they need, adapt when something isn't working. They're not waiting for someone to assign the next step.
Upstanding global citizens have agency in contribution. They act on the world, not just in it. They see problems and feel equipped to address them.
Curiosity, kindness, and academic accomplishment are what make agency constructive rather than just individualistic. Agency without curiosity becomes rigid. Agency without kindness becomes selfish. Agency without accomplishment becomes aimless.
Our HEART framework names this too: being engaged (acting rather than waiting), being adventurous (treating new challenges as experiments), being resilient (iterating when something doesn't work). These are the dispositions of agency.
Technology, and particularly AI, is making this conversation more urgent by revealing what actually matters in learning.
AI can write a five-paragraph essay. It can solve a math problem. It can generate a presentation. What it can't do, at least not yet, is decide what's worth writing about, which problems are worth solving, or what story is worth telling. Those require judgment, curiosity, values, purpose. Those require agency.
This is why we've been talking about cognitive friction in earlier newsletters. Students need the experience of working through problems to build the underlying thinking that will let them direct tools rather than be directed by them.
Brookwood is a structured environment. Students show up, complete work, contribute to community. And within that model, there's a real difference between structure that builds agency and structure that only enforces compliance. One says: here's why this matters, here's the goal, you have voice in your approach, when you struggle that's part of learning. The other says: do this because I said so, and failure means you didn't comply.
We're trying, always imperfectly, to build the first kind. To create conditions where students can act, experiment, iterate, and learn. Where they develop judgment alongside capability. Where they understand what to do, why it matters, and how to adapt it.
When families choose Brookwood, you're not choosing a guarantee of specific outcomes. We can't promise your child will pursue any particular career path. We don't know what those paths will look like in 2035 or 2040.
What we can offer is intentionality about building agency. About helping your child become someone who can set direction in uncertainty, who can learn what they need when they need it, who can iterate through challenges, who can act with both competence and care.
In an age where the future is genuinely unknowable, where AI is accelerating change in ways we're still understanding, agency isn't a backup plan. It's the foundation. It's what allows everything else to work.
Our mission is a bet on what endures when everything else is changing. And watching our daughters navigate their own futures right now, I'm grateful we're making that bet with your children every day.
-David Saunders
Director of Leadership, Changemaking, & Technology
