Malcom and Laura Gauld, Hyde School

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Malcolm Gault has been president of High School, a private boarding school focused on character education, since 1998 and recently became executive chairman. Laura Gauld is now president of Hyde School, and she runs the school. Thanks for coming in today.

Laura Gauld:

Thank you.

Malcolm Gauld:

Thanks for having us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it probably goes without saying, but you are married to each other.

Malcolm Gauld:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And parents of three children.

Laura Gauld:

Three grown.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Three grown children.

Laura Gauld:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm interested in the work that you've been doing really, for multiple decades now with the Hyde School, because your school has become really known around, at least around the country, maybe around the world, for the type of education that it offers. It's unique.

Laura Gauld:

It's very unique, actually. The original campus, which is here in Bath, Maine, was founded by Malcolm father Joseph Galt, and that was a little over 50 years ago. So he basically started with a hypothesis. If, if you focused on character, would achievement follow? So that was, you know, that was what he set out to test. And then later in the mid-70s, we realized that if you want to reach the deepest part of kids, you know, there's two big influencers. So you have the parents, you have the peer group. So we were covering the peer group, but then we had to engage the parents. And so really, I would say the two big differentials at Hyde is character development. Not, not just, you know, poster on the wall, but real character development and then parent involvement, parent engagement, parent growth as the most important role models for the students.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How old are your children now?

Laura Gauld:

Do you know or do you want me to?

Malcolm Gauld:

I know.

Laura Gauld:

Okay. Good.

Malcolm Gauld:

Let's get 27, 25, and 23.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as I was reading this book, the Biggest Job We'll Ever have, which was published in 2001, written by both of you, I was reading some older stories about, I believe, a daughter who was giving some difficulty at the age of four with potty training.

Laura Gauld:

Oh, yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that was a few years ago then.

Laura Gauld:

She was our feisty, take no prisoners, spirited child. And not to put labels, but you tend to do that. And at 27, she is still feisty, take no prisoners, spirited. But I've learned along the way how you know, what to take hold of and what to let go of. And because I think where that potty training story was the beginning of my issue as her mother trying to control her. And the more I tried to control her, the more difficult it got. And what I learned going through this parent program and learning some of these things that we talk about was, you know, focus on myself, like, not try to seek her love and just let go of any guilt that you feel and just, like, focus on what I needed to do. And even today, I always preference. Even when she came home, I said, you know, something was going on, and, you know, I see that she's got to deal with something. I was like, you know, would you like any input? And she's like, well, I know what you're gonna say. I was like, well, you know, hey, I don't need to say, it's your life. And of course, when I let go, next thing you know, she's like, no, I do want to hear what you have to say. So I think the essence of our kids when they're born, the spirit of our kids, is all unique, so. But she tested me in a way that no other human being has ever tested me in my life. I mean, not even my own mother. This child was put on this earth to help me be a better person. And I love her dearly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You weren't entirely sure that you wanted to be a teacher, is that right, Malcolm?

Malcolm Gauld:

I thought I wanted to do it for a little while, a couple years maybe. And I started out in the late 70s, and I was, oh, I don't know, gonna go to law school or something like that. And then I think what happens to a lot of us teachers is I got hooked on it after a while. I did spend some time in the business world and my late 20s, but found that working with kids, I'm not looking at my watch. I'm not wondering what time it is. I found myself thoroughly engrossed in it. And so that's what I've been doing now for 40 years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You started out at Hyde School also.

Malcolm Gauld:

I went to Hyde School.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You went to Hyde School before you went on to Bowdoin and then Harvard.

Malcolm Gauld:

Yes. The joke in our family is Joe Gault had to start a school so his son would have a place to go. So I went there for four years myself and had a huge impact on me. And I think many things are different today about the school, but the core is still the same, and that is the focus on character development and unique purpose in life. Those two things together. Character is often viewed as talked about a lot today in America, but it's talked about, I think, maybe as an end in itself. Whereas we believe that it is the key to your destiny. And we need to develop our character if we're going to be the special, unique person we were meant to be. And I think that's what we're trying to do. I mean, the whole time I've been an educator for 40 years, I've heard about this thing called education reform, Okay? I even remember my parents talking about it when I was a little kid. So it makes you wonder, when does this thing actually kick in? When do we actually do this thing called reform? And what we believe is that there's a fundamental flaw in our schooling system in our country. And that flaw, we believe, is we care more about what they can do than about who they are, and they know it. And I'm talking about the kids in America. We're focused on what they can do. We're not focused on who they are. And so what we try to do at Hyde, I think what we were trying to do then and what we're trying to do now is focus on who you are.

Laura Gauld:

Right? And I think we. What we've found is if you get kids to focus on what they can control, and there's really only three things. You know, their attitude, how much effort they put in, and their character. Most kids are gonna do pretty well.

Malcolm Gauld:

They're gonna also achieve.

Laura Gauld:

They're gonna have achievement. And, you know, achievement's important. Like, we don't want our kids sitting on the couch and not showing up for life. But the overemphasis on achievement. And of course, the biggest change I've seen is the parent. The parent involvement, the parent enmeshment, the parent desperately needing friendship with our kids. So you think when we were raised, you know, my stepfather had no interest in a relationship with me? Like, he had his own friends. He didn't want he no more cared about whether or not we were, like, having a conversation. And, you know, he was raising me. And thank goodness. And, you know, and yet with our own kids, I got off track because, like, I wanted a relationship with them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And.

Laura Gauld:

And then I see even more today. The biggest change is how to help the parents, you know, how to help the adults in this culture get back to. To giving them the help that they need. Because I also think we have a culture too, where unless you have a huge problem, you don't ask for help. You gotta figure it out. Sometimes the people who really have the big problems, they sometimes get liberated because they get to ask for help.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've done a series of workshops called Biggest Job, and it's all of. They're all about parenting. One of the things that I was struck by was, was the raft experiment, where you created a raft made of tape, I guess, on the floor, right? And then you asked someone to step on the raft and try to keep the raft balance as if it were really in the water. And then you successively added more people to that raft as though they were part of a family, and asked people to observe what the dynamic was as you added more people to that. And it really made me think about how as a family, we can get pulled off course if we don't understand that. You can have one person on the raft who is creating a lot of disturbance, and then you can have somebody else on the raft who's doing most of the work to keep it balanced. And that's something that I don't. You know, as we become parents, we're just so. We're just trying to keep them alive at first. And then over time, sometimes we don't even recognize that family dynamics have gotten distorted.

Laura Gauld:

Right. And what we try to say in that exercise, it's. So you're right to pick that out because that is such a visual for people, because everybody can relate to some role on that raft. But the point of that exercise is you got to ask yourself, what's at the center of our family? And is it fuzziness? Is it confusion? You know, because you're often bringing different people together from different upbringings. Is it a person, like, if that person's having a good day, we're all having a good day? Or is it a set of principles? What are your values? What are your go to things? What are you all about? And. And what we learned is if anytime we had. I'm thinking anytime we had an issue with our kids, it was usually, we're not aligned with Our principles. It really wasn't the kids behavior that was the. The alarm and the other thing that wrath exercise shows. You know, we ask kids and we ask adults, how many of you have ever been at the time, same center of the raft. Lots of people play that role. And then you have the person you just add. And you say to them, you take whatever role you feel you need to take, okay? And then you get out of the way. And a lot of times there are kids in a family who are flying under the radar. They might be smoking pot. They're just smoking it in the basement, not out in the back porch where the rebel is smoking it. But they don't. They. They're not. Nobody's. Nobody's challenging them because they might be achieving, they might not be. They might be compliant, you know. And then you have the primary raft balancer, which was me. It's a lot of moms. It's not always the mom. So I don't want to, like, go gender here, but a lot of times it is. It was me. I was the primary ref balancer. And then in some ways, I pushed my husband out. And then I had to realize, wait a minute, we're not even working as a team. I'm upset with him for not stepping up, but I've given him no place to step up. So the raft is a great way for everybody to kind of say, all right, where are we? Where do we want to go? What shifts do we all have to make? Because at the end of the day, when you make a shift, you can never fix a person in your family, but when you make a shift, you create an opening.

Malcolm Gauld:

And I'd also add that one thing I've noticed over the last 40 years is the line of who's responsible for what? Has really maybe never been as blurred as it is now. And I'll give you an example. I remember it was around this time of my senior year in high school, when we were having dinner at home one night, my mother turned to me and said, so what are you doing about that college thing anyway? You know? And I outlined. I was looking at some schools, and I even picked a. I sort of picked a strategy where I applied to four really competitive schools where I could have easily been rejected at all of them. And my mother heard my strategy, and she said, well, that doesn't sound like a very good strategy. You know, you ought to have some fallbacks, and you oughta. That's. So she sort of threw in. But she also said, but it's your life. You know, good luck. I don't know many parents today that handle it that way. The parents are very engaged right into helping write the essay and making. It's just. There is an engagement that I don't think is right. And I think it's. It went from maybe being maybe even too much my problem to the parent owning way too much of it. And I think that's maybe a metaphor for a lot of what we're seeing now. And I think that raft exercise can help sort that out too, of who's. Who's responsible for what.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think it can be hard if you are the parent who is maybe giving your child more responsibility to see that you're a little bit alone in this. When you look around and all the other parents are hiring college coaches and they're taking their kid to 20 different schools around the country starting their sophomore year. And there as a parent and even as a child who's observing this, it can be hard to stand your ground somewhat.

Laura Gauld:

Well, again, you think about when we had the neighborhood growing up, and there were lots of norms that some of them were just not. They were unspoken norms, but they were norms. And if you were out of line, any parent could discipline you. You accepted that. You knew your parents would do that. I know when we raised our kids, even in Maine, small town, there were people who were like, don't talk to my kid. And we tried to set the example. But there is a little bit of, you're right, this fear in the achievement race that if you could kind of let go and step back, your child may lose their place in line. And what is part of my mission in life is really more than even working at a school is helping parents realize that the greatest gift you can give your kids is to let go of the achievement, focus on the character, set an example of a always reinventing yourself, always growing, always changing. And then you can sit back and it doesn't mean the problems go away. But I feel like now we're getting some of the payback as our grown kids. They're no longer kids, but they're always going to be. My kids are adults and they. I am so proud of them. You know, they have issues, they have successes, they have failures. They're not my trophy case. They belong to them. And I get to. Now, luckily, they want us in their lives, and that's a wonderful thing. But I mean, I had. We had to, like you say, you have to roll that dice. And I've seen people where, you know, kids that were pushed on the achievement Track, okay. And they got into the grade schools and they fell apart down the road of life because they never knew how to fail. They never took a risk. And again, we still try to help those people because we say, hey, you're a great person and you're failing. So what are you going to do? Pick yourself up, deal with it. But you're absolutely right. We have to put the weight of our foot somewhere as a society. And, you know, you even see what's going on today with, you know, the sexual harassment, all that. I think as a culture, maybe we are seeing. Let's look at this through the character lens, not through the political lens. Well, I think it's the same thing as parenting. Let's view our kids through the character lens. And if we do that, especially if you have high expectations your kids are going to achieve and the great thing about their achievements is they won't be achievements. You did that. They never really get the confidence from. Because as Mal said, you paved the way. You called that school, you got them in there, you wrote the excuse, you minimized the that. So they're not going to feel, they're not going to have the great confidence that comes from that achievement if it's not theirs.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

One of the stories that you told Malcolm was about a soccer team that you were the coach of. And it was a group of girls who weren't really taking themselves seriously. They weren't winning any games. But that wasn't even the problem. The problem was that they weren't showing up in their scrimmage outfits, their practice outfits. They were bringing their purses and the makeup. And there was a lot of, I guess, inattention to the reason why they were on a soccer team. And so rather than preach at them, you just said, listen, this is a soccer team. We're going to, we're going to act like a soccer team. It's almost like an act as if maybe you're not going to win. It's completely fine.

Malcolm Gauld:

Move the body and the mind will follow a little bit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Exactly. And then by the, maybe the second season, they were actually asking for additional opportunities to do winter soccer and they were actually starting to win. But you weren't brow beating them. And it wasn't about your ego. And whether they won or not, it was make it possible for them to engage in the behavior that might lead them to success, which is important.

Malcolm Gauld:

Well, I had been an athlete and played sports in college and had taken it very seriously. And it was a big part of my life. And so here I had These kids who weren't looking at it that way. And I had coached kids who were so I had had that too. But I think one of the things we do at Hyde is that's unique is we like to say that we don't have extracurricular activities. Everything's co curricular. I mean everybody does academics, everyone does athletics, everyone does performing arts and community service. And we test ourselves in a wide variety of ways. You're going to probably do some things you're good at. You're going to do some things you're not good at. Everyone's going to see you do both. And so we don't. So first, I mean we don't look at something like soccer as an add on, as an extracurricular activity. We, we view it that's a character building opportunity. And so that's what we did there. And, and it wasn't. I mean winning is fun and we like to do that. But, but, but you know, we're gonna, let's be the best we can be. I mean, let's be the best soccer team we can be, you know, with what we have. And that first season that meant zero wins and eight losses. And I remember we scored a goal around the fourth game and we were kids were jumping up and down like we won the super bowl or something. But, but I think that, but it taught me something about that you kind of take the kids where they are and I think, and build from there. And I think that's true in academics too. I mean, one of the things that I like to do is I'll often run a school meeting where I'll ask the question, how many of you have been told that you're bright kids who don't apply yourself? And every hand goes up and I like to tweak them a little bit and go, well, I'm sorry to tell you, but it's not true. And I go, what do you mean? I go, some of you aren't bright. I'm not going to name any names, but that's the way we look at it in this country. And we've done that that way for a while. Our first priority is how bright the person is or how bright the person is not. And we generally don't even talk about that. If someone's not bright, we just don't tell them. But what we try to do is let's forget about that. Let's just work hard and see what happens. Let's put the effort first rather than how. And the thing that's encouraging is so many people out there like Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck and Paul Tough are kind of coming around to that idea that, as Carol Dweck says, if you praise kids for being bright, if you praise kids for working hard, they'll work hard in tough times and try to rise to the top. If you praise them for being bright, they will avoid challenges where they don't look good because they want you to say that to them. And they'll think that if they don't do well, they're not bright. So there's a lot. It's encouraging actually, to see our culture maybe coming around to that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I completely agree with this idea that we are focusing so much on achievement and external things being motivators for kids, whether it's getting into the right college, whether it's winning the right championship, whether it's scoring the right scores on your SATs.

Laura Gauld:

And then.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And even, and specifically I think about kids in high school athletics, you know, that they, you're on this track for such a long time, then I will often see as patients, people who have. They reach the end of the road and there's nothing external to achieve anymore. And there's a sense of emptiness. And some people even get very depressed about it. So by giving, setting people up with a certain structure when they're younger, you're really putting them at a disadvantage when they're older.

Malcolm Gauld:

Well, example that I'd give on that, this is maybe one of my latest harangues, maybe is I've had a lifelong love of athletics. I still play, we call it geezer lacrosse and old man basketball and stuff like that. And, you know, here I am in my 60s and looking back over my athletic life, most of the athletics I played were on a field unsupervised by adults. Okay, there was a ball out there, and you pick up teams, you settle disputes. It was not adult controlled. And now the athletes that I see, including our own children who are involved in this very much travel teams, adult controlled. The adults determine the playing time. And at the end, I don't know if you're going to love it, if they're going to love it as much if they don't have that experience. And maybe we're doing a little too much of that, not just in, in athletics, but in other endeavors as well.

Laura Gauld:

And I think I would add to that that like anything, whether it's sports, whether your achievements came through music or through an academic field, at the end of the day, if you don't have the great confidence in yourself, if you're

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

getting

Laura Gauld:

your confidence from some exterior decision and you think, you know, you have to help people, teach them to be lifelong learners. So, yeah, it's tough. You're no longer an elite athlete or you're no longer at the top of your game here. But I think we've always tried to encourage the adults in our communities, the parents and the teachers. We're doing character here. So you got to keep working on your unique potential. You have to keep changing. We just had a in service day with all of the adults and the whole focus was challenging each other to, you know, where do you need to reinvent yourself? Where are you feeling stale and why are we doing that? We're doing that to be role models for the kids. So in fact, you end up like you say, you know, there's always juncture points and in your life, it's hard when your kids don't need you anymore. It's hard when you, you know, when they go to their first job, when you realize that's it. Yeah, you got to cry a little and then you got to pick yourself up, you got to reinvent yourself and you got to move to the next thing. And, and, and I think you have a better chance of doing that if you've experienced the joys of some failure and some struggle as well as wonderful to win championships and succeed. But you know, those girls on that team, and I remember because we were young teachers back then, those girls on that team continue to talk about that season because they reinvented themselves as athletes and some of them went on to, you know, play in college, others didn't. But they look back on that. That was a benchmark for them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

There's a. I said, I think it was a set of nine different things that you talked. Ten different things. That makes more sense. I guess 10 is more even number that you talked about over the course of the book. And one of the biggest ones was harmony versus truth, which I think is very important because we have gotten into this strange society of niceness and we wanting everything to be good and happy. And that really has put us in a weird place. I think as a culture and it does this in families as well.

Laura Gauld:

That priority is number one, it's truth over harmony. So it's trying to remind all of us at the end of the day, you put the weight of your foot in being truthful over the harmony. It's, I think, the most important thing and not just as a family, but in an organization and school company. And I would go back to a school Though in a family, what happens is the kids don't want to tell us the truth. And then as adults, we don't want to know the truth. We say we want to know the truth. And we say, truth is the most important thing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is the only thing.

Laura Gauld:

We'll spank you. You know, we said all, but at the end of the day, the truth screws you up, and the truth gets in the way of your plans. And then you got to stop dropping deal, and then you got to look like a circus act with a local town. And, you know, we had all those things where I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's blowing up in the restaurant. We wrote a book on parenting. You know, should we just, like, dampen this down? And you have to then sit down, say, screw it. Liberate yourself. And it's the same thing in an organization like, I know almost on a daily basis, I deal with my colleagues. There's always a thing in my head, okay, how honest are we going to be here? Are we going full honesty, like, full frontal honesty? Or are we going to just go harmony here? And again, it's not like you walk around telling everybody the truth, because that's not.

Malcolm Gauld:

It's not truth instead of harmony, that's.

Laura Gauld:

That's not a good. Just over in an organization, always. But you're aware, like, at the end of the day. And one of the things we have in the Hyde organization with the adults is we are going to strive to put truth over harmony. So if that appeals to you, if that appeals to you, as. As an attempt adult, we're excited to have you here. If that's something that you don't really want to be a part of, that's okay, too. It's just, this is our culture. And again, in our family, we try to say, at the end of the day, guys, this is what we do, you know? And even when it screws things up, one of the.

Malcolm Gauld:

One of the things that. It's an old Hyde tradition. One of our oldest is way we do faculty evaluations. I always tell people when we do. When we have faculty interviews, you always watch. We tell them how we do evaluations to see how they're going to take it. But we do them live where the faculty member sits on the stage in front of the whole school, and we ask the student body, what are the positive points of Mr. Jones teaching? Then the second question is, what are the things Mr. Jones needs to work on? And then third, is there anything special you'd like to say to Mr. Jones we've had that same format for over 30 years, and you think the kids would tee off on the faculty, but what ends up happening is they can't believe that the adults would ever put themselves in such a vulnerable position that they go the other way. They tend to go kid gloves a little bit. And all we're saying is let's take the things that are being said in the locker room anyway and let's bring them out into the open. So it's not just something for the kids. It's something, you know, we're all trying to. I always tell the kids, I'm. I'm 63 years old. I don't have all the character I need. You know, I, you know, I'm still working. I'm still a work in progress. We try to try to promote that idea that every one of us is a work in progress and we need some help to move along. So

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

as parents, one of the things that you bring up is that it's never too late. And even though we've been talking mostly about kids who are up to the age of high school and maybe a little bit beyond, I would think that it's never too late to work on being a parent, really, even when your

Malcolm Gauld:

kids are adults, we sometimes say it's never too late to be what you might have been, you know, and, yeah,

Laura Gauld:

it's never too late. I would say to anybody, as Mel said, you're always with. Trying to, you know, I know with my own kids, there were times where I let them down because I wasn't in the best place I needed to be. I think overall, they, they got a pretty good mom. And. But you can't go back. And when you feel guilt about things you didn't do, but what you can do if you're breathing, okay, you're a parent if you have a kid, and you're going to be that parent until you take that last breath. And so, so if you start with yourself, and it's great to be able to say to your kids, you know, I'm sorry about that, you know, I let you off the hook a lot in that area. And that's one thing I, you know, I know I. And I'm sorry I did that, and here's how I'm going to move forward. Or if you make a change and you realize you're, you're, you know, you're not feeling great about where your grown children are, make a change yourself. And that creates that ripple effect. But sure, it's never too early. It's never too late. It's an ongoing process.

Malcolm Gauld:

And you have to believe, I think, that there's a little bit of an act of faith. I mean, sometimes we do something with our kids and they don't respond, it doesn't work. And we go, oh my God, that didn't work. You know, and so then I know I've had the experience as an educator where the kid calls you up 25 years later and says something that you did way back. I just had one of those recently. And you know, you just don't know. I mean, you have to believe that it's the right thing, but it's not a one to one relationship. It's not like as a parent, if I do this with my child, that's going to come back at within our family within a month. There's definitely an act of faith. Somebody once said about teaching that the teacher has to accept the idea that you never get to know where your influence ends. And I think that's true about parenting also.

Laura Gauld:

I also think if you're a person out there who doesn't have kids, there's lots of people out there that need committed adults and need parents, need role models. And so just look around. Even in this state, there's such a need out there for young people to have role models with aspirations and who can share their failures and who can show their grit and what they've gone through. So, you know, it's not just taking care of our own family. It's like looking around and saying, how do we help those people right now who aren't lucky enough?

Malcolm Gauld:

Near the end of my coaching days, I got into this little ritual that I would do at the end of every game. I would go up to a kid on the other team and pull him or her aside and say, boy, you really gave us a rough day today. Your great job and good luck and. And your kids see you do that and it becomes a little less of a us against them and a little bit more we're in this community trying to help all kids be the best they can be.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I look forward to your next book.

Laura Gauld:

Or books.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It sounds like there's a few in the works, so we'll see. Whenever those are out, I'll make sure that I have a chance to read them.

Laura Gauld:

Good luck. Those.

Malcolm Gauld:

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with Malcolm Gauld, who has been president of the Hyde School, a private boarding school focused on character education since 1998 and recently became executive chairman, and Laura Gauld, who is now the president of Hyde School and runs the school and I'm married with three children. Congratulations on successfully bringing them to adulthood.

Malcolm Gauld:

Thanks.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And thank you for all of the hard work that you're doing in this of Maine and being here today.

Malcolm Gauld:

Thanks for having us.

Laura Gauld:

Com.