Why, Bard?

Thea Parsons ’25

When I arrived at Bard in 2022, fresh out of middle school and still coming down from the long haul of COVID, I felt ready to take on the world. A mixture of anxiety and jittery excitement swirling in my belly, I knew that the next four years would be challenging, but that if I worked hard, that challenge would come with the sweetness of a job well done. Despite my nervous hope that Bard would be the perfect place for me, the home I embraced with open arms didn’t always receive me the way I wished it would. There is no place I would’ve rather spent the past four years—I have grown more intellectually, socially, and emotionally than I ever expected to—but BHSEC undeniably has its flaws. 

There is something demoralizing about being called the “worst grade” that has ever paraded through Bard’s sparsely decorated halls. For years, high schoolers at BHSEC have been held up to the immortalized “Bard Student.” A person with a perfect GPA and SAT score who participates in more clubs than you can count on your fingers, volunteers, and is filled with inspired curiosity leers down at us. They existed before the internet ran rampant, before AI gave students an out from essay writing, and, supposedly, before senioritis. Yet I challenge the notion that there was ever a group of students who perfected their work-life balance in a way that left them able to read Plato cover to cover while getting hammered at a legendary “bardy.” And, if the perfect “Bard Student” ever existed, they have been long dead. So why is the graduating class of 2025, one that has come after years of students who filled their quarantine with TikTok, the problem?

It is because the education system has long denied problems now at the forefront of its mind. It is because people believe that an admission process defined by lotteries and essay writing negatively carries less “exclusivity” than one that uses an hours-long test. At Bard, the student population has been transforming—not deteriorating, but rapidly morphing—for years, just as it has across the city. The class of 2025 is not a “problem grade,” it is the product of a denial of change. 

While I appreciate everything Bard does for its students, it also holds them up to an impossible standard. Rather than meeting the “new” American teenager halfway, the elitist New York City education system stands back and points derisively at us, labeling us as the “worst” they’ve ever seen. While there is undeniably a problem when student’s phones ping in the back of classrooms and Chat GPT is detected in nearly every paper, the solution is not to look back at the past, to the “Bard Student” of yore, and to restrict high schoolers until they mirror an ideal. Taking away phones and free periods shows an unwillingness to negotiate or meet students halfway, stopping students from making Bard their own. Just as it hasn’t worked to leave student populations unrestricted, it won’t work to hold independent minds under a thumb. 

Speaking from experience, Bard’s unfortunate tradition of denying the humanity of high school students in an effort to foster independent, curious minds leaves people burnt out. So, while I love Bard and am filled with pride to have called it my intellectual home for the past four years, it has miles to go, and I hope it learns from us just as much as we learned from it.