Parenting in a pathologically competitive, information-saturated city can make anyone crazy, even those parents lucky enough to be worried about fennel burgers in school lunches. And while Avenues offers its students every imaginable educational benefit — a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, a Harvard-designed “World Course” — it has also tapped into an even deeper, more complicated parental anxiety: the anxiety of wanting their kids to have every advantage, but ensuring that all those advantages don’t turn them into privileged jerks.
As Manhattan, and particularly downtown, is transformed by a staggering infusion of wealth, there is a growing market for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders who, as a result of their emotional intelligence, have a little humility. In fact, when the nearby Grace Church School was researching whether to start its own high school, it asked top college-admission officers what was lacking in New York City applicants. The answers coalesced around the idea of values, civic engagement, inclusiveness and diversity — in a word, humility.
And so Avenues students may run to their “Empire State of Mind: Thinking About Jay-Z in a New Way” “mini-mester” while passing a Chuck Close self portrait, but they do so with the intent of being “humble about their gifts and generous of spirit,” as the school’s mission statement puts it. “We wanted a school that was innovative and wouldn’t force our kids into any particular mold,” says Sheree Carter-Galvan, an Avenues parent and a general counsel at Yale University. Or, as Ella Kim, mother of a 4-year old, explains, Avenues took the anxiety of a New York parent — albeit of a certain type — “and designed a school around that.”
Last winter, a group of Avenues 4-year-olds ventured out to the 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea to view the work of John A. Parks, an English painter, who fingerpainted his childhood memories. Schulman thought it segued seamlessly with a unit they were doing on abstract art, which included studies of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Schulman, who always seems to be brimming with excitement, explained how the subject matter and the field trip were perfect for the immersion classes. “You can use the vocabulary in both languages,” she said, to learn about the art.
Much more on Avenues, here.