THE WONDER OF LETTING GO

By Dr. Sam Adams, Head of School, Seven Peaks School

I read a book this winter called, The Uncontrollability of the World, by Hartmut Rosa. Rosa is a German sociologist and political scientist–so I don't expect you’ll be inclined to pick this book up for some casual reading this summer! But you’re a bright class and I think you might find what he has to say interesting. Now, as I was thinking about what I wanted to say to our graduating class of 2025, I kept coming back to this book. I kept coming back to it because Rosa’s argument has helped me think more clearly about the sort of education we are providing here at Seven Peaks and it seems worth sharing with you as you are just finishing your time here and we are sending you out into the world of high school and beyond! 

First, Rosa observes the obvious: one of the characteristics of our Modern world is that we want, we even expect, the world to be controllable. We spend time, money, and all sorts of resources in trying, with varying degrees of success, to control our world. This is something that the structure of our world demands of us, and something that we are compelled to do because of the culture in which we find ourselves. In other words, when you get a job someday, likely your job will be about controlling some aspect of the world. Just think about any job you might have–it will almost certainly be focused on controlling some aspect of the world. Medicine, technology, engineering, even running a school. I received a sweet card from a third grader yesterday that said, “Dear Dr. Adams, thanks for keeping everything in line.” And we all generally see this as something good, something worth pursuing. This isn’t super profound. In fact, it’s pretty obvious. 

But this got me thinking about education. How much of our education is about controlling our world? After all, we're preparing you for what we imagine are the jobs of the future. You learn math and science to be able to predict and control the natural world. Learning design is a practical outworking of the sorts of things you learn in order to control different aspects of the world, solving its many problems. We learn language to be able to have certain levels of control as we interact with other people, either through writing, through speech, or through communication to people in a language different from the one we learned from birth. I could keep going through all the subjects we study–PE, Individuals and Societies, Visual Arts, and even Performing Arts. All teach us to gain control, in certain ways, of the world around us. I don’t think any of this is bad! In fact, I think what we learn in SEL might be the most important, that is, self-regulation and thoughtful self-control. 

But here’s where Rosa’s thesis gets interesting. He argues that “the cultural promise of making the world controllable, not only does not work but in fact becomes distorted into its exact opposite” (19). When we push too hard to control the world, we find that it becomes even more uncontrollable. 

This made me think of technology. We came up with cell phones, then smartphones, as a way to give ourselves more and more control over our lives. But we’re just now learning how much they control us and we are having a hard time pulling back from their control. 

Now we’ve got emerging artificial intelligence. There’s all sorts of talk about AI and how much control we’ll be able to gain over our lives through the use of this remarkable tool. But, at the same time, we are definitely aware of the control we are losing, or are about to lose, to this emerging technology. The harder we try to control the world, the more it slips out of our control in ways we didn’t expect. 

There are a million different ways in which this is true, and likely the job you have in the future will be partly gaining control of the world in a new way, but also working to regain control of the world from something we’ve lost. For example, there’s a lot of work to be done dealing with the effects of climate change–developing new technology to regain control of an environment that is increasingly out of our control. When we push too hard to control the world, we find that it becomes even more uncontrollable and we lose touch with the world; we, in a sense, as Rosa would say, “lose the world”--it slips out of our grasp. 

But if we step back and lighten our grip, we’ll discover that part of what makes life so wonderful just is the very uncontrollability of the world. There’s a magic in the discovery of a world outside of our control.

Hartmut Rosa uses the example of snow to make this point. He writes:

Do you still remember the first snowfall on a late autumn or winter day, when you were a child? It was like the intrusion of a new reality. Something shy and strange that had come to visit us, falling down upon and transforming the world around us, without our having to do anything. An unexpected gift. Falling snow is perhaps the purest manifestation of uncontrollability. We cannot manufacture it, force it, or even confidently predict it, at least not very far in advance. What is more, we cannot get hold of it or make it our own. Take some into your hand, it slips through your fingers. Bring it into the house, it melts away. Pack it away in the freezer, it stops being snow and becomes ice. Maybe that is why so many people–not only children–long for it, especially around the holidays. (1)

I suspect your time in Costa Rica was a wonderful time of learning and discovering the world as something you didn’t control. From the rainforests, to the rivers, to the language of the families in whose homes you ate, to, most importantly, the families themselves–the marvelous uncontrollability of it made it full of wonder and newness. 

We end your Seven Peaks Journey by taking you to a foreign country so that the wideness and mystery of the world might be exposed to you in such a way that you learn to appreciate it as it is, in its foreignness and not as something you need to immediately change and control. Having a global perspective is seeing the value in the cultures and people who are not within your sphere of control–and letting that be ok. 

You have been at school without cell phones so that you experience relationships in the halls, on the playground, and in the classroom without the need for technology to mediate or control them. The face to face interaction with our classmates and friends is a direct engagement with the uncontrollability of other people–and that’s what makes relationships so special. When you try to control your friendships–and nowadays that’s often through technology–you lose them. 

Here at Seven Peaks, we have worked hard to share the world with you in a way that lets you ask questions and discover new things, even as we are teaching you what you need to know for the next phase of life. As Rosa writes, “Education is…a process of continual transformation in which the subject develops into a person with [their] ‘own voice,’ a voice that is itself also uncontrollable” (68). 

Here at Seven Peaks, you have learned to develop your own voice, your own way of engaging with the world around you, so that its mystery is met by your curiosity. It is in this interaction–you openly discovering the world–that actual learning takes place. Your education here has given you the skills you need to carry on learning in a way that meets the world thoughtfully without needing to control everything in it. Our school’s vision–something we have decided is what we want to achieve through the education we provide–is that our students “will emerge intellectually curious, confident in their education and individuality, compassionate towards others and inspired to do good in the world.” 

It’s this posture toward the world–one of curiosity and wonder toward that which is uncontrollable and different– that makes you an IB learner and a Seven Peaks Student. This openness to the uncontrollability of the world builds compassion toward others and, as we discover so much good in this uncontrollability, we are inspired to do good; to be a positive and kind presence in the world and in the lives of those with whom we come into contact. 

As your middle school years now come to a close, we are sending you off into our community and beyond confident that you have developed your own voice and that you will be just the sort of people the world needs for it to become a better and more peaceful world.