David O'Halloran, Headmaster - Saint David's School, New York City

Do the benefits of genetically modified foods (GMOs) for human consumption outweigh the harms for the health of people and the environment? Should the government impose an age limit of 18 on the use of social media platforms as it imposes age limits on the use of tobacco and alcohol?  Should physician-assisted suicide be legalized in the United States as a compassionate option for terminally ill patients? With passionate defenders on both sides, our eighth grade boys recently faced off in a series of debates on these and other hot-button, complex public health issues. The boys were assigned to find and read an article that discussed a current issue in public health in which two or more “sides” were presented. They then selected the topics that they wanted to debate. In their opening statements, arguments, rebuttals, crossfire questions, and closing summaries the debaters were judged on how well they made distinct arguments supported by evidence, explained the science, and presented...

When he was in seventh grade, Emmet O. '21 loved life at Saint David's School and with his friends. He was active in sports, on the school paper, and served on student council. Then, after experiencing symptoms, he learned he had Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), which he describes as a life-changing diagnosis. Last Thursday, Emmet, a senior at Regis High School, who will be attending The University of Pennsylvania in the fall, inspired our seventh and eighth graders with a Chapel talk about his response to the diagnosis. Rather than allowing it to discourage him, he was determined to control his condition independently, to raise awareness about the disease, and to help provide a support system for other young people diagnosed with T1D.  Emmet became an active volunteer for a variety of diabetes organizations. He also wrote an adventure story, Drew Discovers Diabetes , about a dinosaur who is diagnosed with T1D and learns to manage it. Published last year, the book was written to inspire ...

Throughout our program, technology supports the development of integral competencies such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving ability. In her Saint David's Magazine feature article, below, Assistant Headmaster and Head of Upper School, Alexis Aoyama, details the values-driven integration of technology at the school. At Saint David’s School, our focus is on developing the critical mind. Technology serves as a powerful tool to amplify and extend critical thinking skills across disciplines. By integrating cutting-edge digital tools and fostering innovative partnerships, we empower boys to approach complex problems, collaborate globally, and think deeply about the world around them. From exploring global cultures through signature learning experiences to conducting hands-on scientific research with professional-grade technology, students are challenged to analyze, question, and create. Whether solving coding challenges, designing engineering prototypes, or applying gr...

On a recent Friday morning at the NY Hilton, three Saint David's boys participated on the keynote address panel for the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The panel gave each student a chance to share about an innovative, globally minded languages project or learning that they are doing with a teacher.  In front of more than 1,000 educators in attendance, our boys, who were the only elementary school-age presenters, spoke knowledgeably about their projects and confidently answered questions that had been gathered from the audience.   A third grader presented Mi Mascota:  “Our next unit is on pets, and we will be creating books on how to care for different types of pets to share with the animal shelter in Spanish Harlem,” he said. “We hope our directions will help families adopting a pet to take good care of them.” A sixth grader presented Siu Mai Peruano, sharing a Peruvian unit and cooking project from his Spanish class:  “In this project we ...

In the second entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative's quarterly blog series, "The Wisdom Within," Saint David's reflective practitioner and Master Teacher Cathy O'Neill explores the pedagogical power of play in the education of young boys. BRINGING SOUND TO SPACE It began with a mound of mangled metal and the vapor of a vision gleaned from recent comments and random fact-dropping by the Pre-K boys. Unsure of what exactly I was looking for, but fueled by the idea of a makeshift rocket to dovetail with our upcoming space unit, I gingerly picked through the scrap pile until my hands grazed an old VW control panel devoid of its dashboard. Eureka! An array of knobs, dials, and buttons - while in reality, dead as doornails - in the right small hands, would become the epicenter of our NASA-inspired dramatic play corner. With a couple of lawn chairs and some old CB radio microphones to round out the set, engines would be ignited by the power of imagination. All systems go...

It has been reported that even elite college students are unable to handle assignments that involve reading large amounts of text. The average adult human attention span is said to have decreased. We are constantly multi-tasking, scrolling through social media feeds, contending with distractions that beckon us. Much praise is often given to multitaskers, but science tells us that the human brain cannot focus effectively on two things at once. While social media's algorithms may hook us into spending extended periods of time on a particular feed, we are losing our ability to devote time to deep thought, critical analysis, problem-solving, and the encoding and decoding associated with person-to-person communication—all essential to securing and maintaining high level employment and leading a meaningful, purposeful life. So what to do? Great schools often need to be countercultural. At Saint David's, we stand committed to the written word and the book. Reading asks us to engage in...