John H. Zurn
Educational Author- School Consultant
“As parents and teachers, we need to reclaim our traditional role as influencers of our children – not by shouting louder than the influencers our children discover online, but by stressing ideas that are more important than fancy shoes and snappy TikTok tunes.
We need to emphasize traits that everyone agrees children will honor. We need to convince our children that the people who are most important to them have a better understanding of what it takes to be successful in life.”
– John H. Zurn
My Story
John Zurn was born in Erie, Pennsylvania and grew up in a family of nine outside of Philadelphia. He attended independent day schools in the Philadelphia area and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership.
Mr. Zurn taught at four schools before being chosen to serve as Head of School at St. John’s Episcopal School in Olney, MD. Over a twenty year career there, John led efforts to more than double the school’s enrollment and triple the size of the plant space. Mr. Zurn led St. John’s through three Strategic Planning processes and two ten year Accreditation cycles. He introduced Traits for Success, a school-wide character building program, and initiated National Schools Research and Summer Grants Programs for faculty and administration development. Mr. Zurn helped to develop signature educational programs including Traits for Success, Global Citizenship, World Village, International Festival and Multi-Cultural Fair, Environmental Studies, Declamation Day Poetry Recitation, and Model UN. In the spring of 2009, St. John’s Episcopal School was chosen by the National Association of Independent Schools as one of nineteen model Independent Schools across the world for its Global Education Resources Program.
In 2010, Mr. Zurn was appointed Head of the Pegasus School in Huntington Beach, CA and in 2014, Mr. Zurn was chosen to lead St. Michael’s Country Day School in Newport, Rhode Island. Mr. Zurn has served on several Independent School and Independent School Association Boards. He is the parent of two sons- Josh, a Safety Control specialist with Millennium Space Systems in Los Angeles, CA, and Alexander, Mortgage Broker/Owner, Zurn Mortgages in West Chester, PA.
Consulting
John Zurn lives in Newport, RI, where he works on a series of articles related to character education for parents, administrators, and teachers. Mr. Zurn also works with parent groups and schools. Mr. Zurn consults on various topics, but his greatest passion is helping schools bridge the character education gap. As a third party, he helps parents, teachers, and administrators connect to more significant themes in education while honoring the day-to-day challenges of dealing with local communities.
My Approach
Typical sessions begin with time for teachers and administrators to speak together about larger goals for their student population.
A typical consulting session takes a full day with faculty and staff. Teachers spend the first half hour discussing historical principles and shortcomings of our existing school system.
In the second hour, teachers agree on the character traits critical to their local school community.
In the final three hours, teachers, administrators, and staff members map out their year of success traits: how they will emphasize a chosen trait for each month in their classroom, schoolwide Assemblies, and day-to-day respons-ibilities. In the final hour, educators share strategies for each trait to inspire each other and hear the total community effort expended on character education. In the evening, the author meets with parents to discuss what it takes for children to succeed in school and life.
In the end, the community will have a yearlong commitment to educating children for character – a commitment that begins with leadership letters from school administration, moves to assemblies for students, extends to activities in each classroom, and encourages active participation from parents at home. All of these actions currently exist in schools; the difference is in emphasis, coordination, and conviction. Educators and parents will begin to embrace the idea that character is taught in schools every day and that the school works to coordinate the voices of parent and teacher conviction. Mr. Zurn’s process also includes follow-up throughout the ensuing school year.
My Values & Beliefs
Education is a critical institution for a healthy Democracy.
Schools in a democracy were always intended to be universal with a two-fold mission, to teach talent and virtue. Churches and other social institutions were initially expected to teach good character, but no longer have that national impact. As a result, character education is an area that has received limited attention over the past fifty years. Instead, schools have encouraged intellectual abilities alone by rewarding the brightest students with top academic grades.
Academic grades in school set up an intensive competition for A's in which most children cannot compete.
Our grading system sends students the message that the adults in the room are only interested in nurturing talent and intellect, not virtue and character. In effect, if you receive an academic grade of C, you have little talent or intellect. You are a failure in the existing system. Children who receive B’s and C’s view academic grades as either a measure of their failure or, even worse, as a measure of the adult world’s failure in gauging personal potential.
Teachers are teaching content, not to ensure that all children know "X"- they are teaching content so that all children learn what it takes to be successful.
It is critical now that we teach children explicitly how to be successful. This is not teaching them how to be good or correctly spiritual. This is teaching children what millions of adults have learned through parents, through experience, and through self-help books – that to be successful, you must consider the ways you handle character issues like persistence, flexibility and attitude (see Success Traits).
Our children are being marketed and influenced by social forces (technology, corporations, and financial interests) that do not have our children's best interest in mind.
This includes an increasing competition for our children’s attention (social media, video games, technology, AI, 3D Programming), an increasing corporate interest in our children as a consumer group, and technological advances that serve as a polarizing force in society, emphasizing individual needs (freedoms) over group needs (democracy). I understand how Americans might feel disconnected from market-driven forces that define our lives. Intellect trumps character every day in schools across the country. The most intelligent people get the best grades, get into the best schools, and earn the regular praise of our educators, even though this is not the case in the real world where traits like persistence, positive attitude, flexibility, and generosity drive successful people and businesses every day.
Without a clearcut focus on character in schools, children learn that intellectual decisions get made by people with little thought to character.
Schisms are created between the elite few and the less-than-successful many. Students are set up to believe that “My teachers don’t care about me; they only care about the A academic students.” Students and, in turn, adults struggle to deal with issues like “I am a smart, caring person, but I am a failure in school.” These are the trappings of therapy!
It is time for schools to take back control of our children.
We are educators. We are experts who study how children learn. We teach children how to succeed in life. In schools, we can ignore the shared values of character education and hope that our children learn what it means to be productive members of society. Or we can embrace character education, decide what it means (Traits for Success), and teach it.