Weekly Message from HOS 2026/09/07-2026/09/11
Dear Keystonians,
Happy Teacher’s Day to all our faculty and staff! This week, I had the privilege of joining the Shunyi District Teacher’s Day celebration, where a leader offered an expression I had not heard before: teachers are the engineers of the human soul.
It is a common saying in Chinese, I am told. But one of the cool things about being a language learner is hearing new expressions and idioms and being completely enchanted with what others consider ordinary language. In English, we do not often put “engineers” and “souls” in the same sentence, and tend to keep the technical and the spiritual in separate spaces. But the image is wonderful. An engineer does not simply build. An engineer designs systems, anticipates needs, calibrates tolerances, and creates structures that hold.
That is what our teachers do. Every day, they are engineering something invisible but durable—the architecture of a young person’s character, curiosity, and capacity to care.
This has been the very subject of our first two Keystone 101 sessions. We have been exploring the 13-year arc of a Keystone education—how each division, each program, each experience is deliberately designed to shape the kinds of humans the world needs. Humans capable of meaning and purpose. Humans who can do hard things with wisdom and compassion. Humans who are, in the language of our mission, intellectually, culturally, and ecologically fluent.
We do not leave this to chance, we engineer it --carefully, intentionally, and with love.
This week, we also opened the Magpie Playground. At the short opening ceremony, I reflected on why we honor the magpie. We do not honor the magpie because it is magical or fantastical. We honor it because it is of this place. Magpies were here before we had a campus here, living and raising their young on the edges of cornfields that once covered this land. Now they nest in our beautiful trees.
We honor them because they are present. Because they care for their young. Because they remind us to notice what is around us—the beauty of Beijing, the life that shares this place with us, the natural world that will outlast all of us.
When our students notice nature, they learn to appreciate it. When they appreciate it, they learn to care for it. And when they learn to care for it, they become the stewards of the environment our mission calls them to be.
So there is a thread that runs from the magpie to the playground to the engineer of the human soul. It is the thread of intentional care. We honor what came before us. We design for what will come after us. It is the patient, persistent and purposeful work of our teachers that moves this beautiful system forward.
To every teacher and staff member at Keystone: thank you. You are not just building a school. You are engineering human souls.
With gratitude and admiration,
Dr. Emily McCarren
