There is a trend afoot-I'm seeing it among the classmates of my children, and I am surely seeing it in their parents-to look at education as a means to achieving success . . . measured, most likely, in dollars. No big mystery why: It costs so much to provide that education these days, I suppose it's just about inevitable that the people paying for it (and God knows, I'm doing that myself, three times over) should inquire into the return on their investment.

It takes a brave or foolhardy parent to write checks for a couple hundred thousand dollars' worth of schooling and not ask "What kind of job will this equip you for, at the end?" I am not asking this question of my own children, I should add, though I don't have a clue what the answer is either. (With one son studying spoken-word poetry and a daughter focused on forms of sustainable agriculture in third world countries, I'm not holding my breath for one to come along any time soon.) I only know- as a woman who didn't herself finish more than a year of college, and one who names Phillips Exeter as her last serious educational experience-that a weekend among my former classmates confirms, for me, the value of education for its own sake, and the certainty that a person who reads and asks questions, who learns about art and music and poetry and physics and astronomy and history, will possess a kind of wealth even the darkest day on Wall Street, or Alan Greenspan himself, cannot eradicate.

I'm always happy to see and talk to the men and women of my class who have chosen to run companies and even whole countries, negotiate deals with more zeroes in them than the mileage of the 20-year-old car I drive. And I never forget that without contributions to the Academy from others like them, I might not have been able to receive the scholarship that made my own Exeter education possible. But our number would not be complete-and it is part of what I value about the Academy, that I believe it recognizes this-without the flute maker and the writer of satiric political songs, the stock investor who plays his viola on the weekends, the teacher on an Indian reservation, the sculptor who works with blacksmith's tools, the priest who serves as spiritual counsel to an order of nuns in Puerto Rico, the mother or father who has chosen to forgo fame and recognition to be present on the home front with a child. All of those individuals were in attendance at my 30th reunion that weekend too. None of their successes would measure on the Richter scale of the businessman who held forth at the Exeter Inn to the young scribe that lilac-filled morning. But they are no less substantial in my book.

At Home at Exeter

The last thing I did before returning home from my reunion weekend was to attend the service that morning at the Exeter chapel (a building paid for by Christians, perhaps, but a place where all are welcome now). It's a big thing for a person who calls herself, nominally, Jewish, to accept communion, as I did that morning. (And I gather it's no small thing for a priest to offer communion to one such as I, too.) But I think all of us felt, that morning, that we were transcending the usual rules.

Two of the three clergymen who presided over the service that day-Ted Gleason and Dan Morrissey-had served during the years we were students there. The third, Bobby Thompson, the current school chaplain, was known to all of us, back when we were students together, as the possessor of one of the largest and most powerful singing voices ever heard in the town of Exeter, and very likely well beyond. Listening to my classmate Chris Alberti explain, with deep emotion, how much it had meant to him when communion was first offered at chapel, and to the words (and song) of the three clergymen who stood before us offering the bread and wine-three men of so much personal power and presence, each so different-our own differences seemed so much less significant than what united us.

We came from vastly different places, and would return there in a matter of hours. That weekend at least, we felt like a community-richest of all for a kind of diversity that could not have existed a hundred, or 50, or even 30 years ago. There were lawyers and doctors and investment bankers in our midst in good measure, of course. But there were others too. Many of us have accomplished great things, as we were assured we would. Some eminently visible. Some not. We are not all rich. And the extended community of Phillips Exeter would be poorer if that weren't so.

— By Joyce Maynard '71

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