Prepared for the Moment That Matters

Gould is one of sixteen institutions featured in Elevate: 16 Boarding Schools and the Practice of Holistic Education, a new collaborative volume exploring the practice and structure of holistic education in independent boarding schools. 

The book brings together institutional reflections on mission, community, and character. The following article is Gould’s chapter, authored by Head of School Tao Smith ’90, P’23,’28.

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It is the middle of July, and the heat hangs heavy. I am standing in the parking lot of a small community hospital in western Maine with my colleague’s wife and daughter, watching a helicopter descend while we wait for an ambulance to arrive. We do not yet know if Dave is alive or dead. All we know is that a sheriff’s deputy used his phone to call and say there had been a bike accident and that we should come quickly.

Dave is not only a trusted colleague of more than fifteen years. He is family and a godparent to one of my children. As the helicopter circles lower, the ordinary details of our shared life, workdays, conversations, and rituals feel suddenly fragile and suspended.

We arrived before the ambulance. Later, we would learn what had happened. A volunteer firefighter happened upon the scene. He recognized Dave immediately and knew his medical history. When he reached him, there was no pulse. No breath. Quick action and practiced CPR brought him back; broken ribs, but a beating heart. Long enough for emergency responders to stabilize him and transport him here.

As we waited, time stretched and collapsed all at once. We did not know how long he had been without oxygen, what damage might already have been done, or what would come next. We knew almost nothing.

In moments like these, the mind searches for something familiar, something steady to hold onto when nothing feels certain. That grounding arrived in the form of a recent Gould Academy graduate, now serving as an emergency medical technician.

In this moment, she was not a former student but a familiar and trusted authority. While her team prepared to transfer Dave from the ambulance to the helicopter, Sophia came straight toward us. She told us he was alive, though unconscious. She explained that his heart had stopped seven times on the way to the hospital. He was stable now. Did we want to see him before they loaded him onto the helicopter?

I burst into tears. Sophia wrapped her arms around me, then around Kathleen, steady and sure. For the first time in over an hour, I took a breath. Sophia was not acting as a former student. She was acting as a young adult who had been trusted, trained, challenged, and supported, again and again, by a school designed to do exactly that.

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Where Place Teaches

What distinguishes Gould is not simply its location, but the expectations that come with it: attention, effort, reflection, and responsibility. These are habits learned slowly, shaped by daily practice and reinforced over time by both the people and the place itself.

Set back from the pace that defines much of adolescent life, Bethel offers something increasingly rare: space. Not the absence of structure, but room; room to slow down, to notice, to remain with an idea or a challenge long enough for it to matter. For students arriving from crowded schedules and lives of constant motion, this small Maine town in the foothills of the White Mountain National Forest becomes a kind of pause. Growth here is shaped as much by landscape and community as by lessons and experiences; mentors are present not only in formal settings, but in the ordinary, unscripted moments when learning most often takes hold.

Set back from the pace that defines much of adolescent life, Bethel offers something increasingly rare: space. Not the absence of structure, but room; room to slow down, to notice, to remain with an idea or a challenge long enough for it to matter.

This understanding of place as integral to education has been present from the school’s beginning. In 1835, Dr. Nathaniel Tuckerman True opened a school on Bethel Hill that would later become Gould Academy. True believed learning should extend beyond classroom walls and into lived experience. He took students into the surrounding fields and woods not as a break from study, but as an extension of it, trusting that curiosity, confidence, and character develop through direct engagement with the world. As recorded in the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society Online Collections and Catalogue, Dr. True instructed his students “not only in theory but in practice, and it was his delight to take his spring and summer classes in botany through the fields, pastures and woods, gathering and classifying the various wild flowers in their season, or his pupils interested in mineralogy and geology to the summit of Paradise Hill, and sometimes even to the tops of surrounding mountains...”

That belief remains visible today, especially in winter. Each morning begins outdoors, as students travel from Gould’s village campus to the mountain campus at Sunday River Resort. The routine is quiet and, at first glance, unremarkable. Over time, however, it builds something durable. Students learn to prepare: to gather what they need, to read conditions, to take responsibility for showing up ready.

Whether they are clicking into race skis and snowboards, training as Ski Patrollers, teaching local elementary students, or navigating unfamiliar backcountry terrain, they learn to take responsibility for their gear, their decisions, and the people around them. They learn to listen to feedback, adjust, and try again. Between runs, in unscheduled, unscripted conversations, students begin to imagine who they might become if they keep practicing this kind of attention.

This rhythm is intentional. From the beginning, Gould understood the surrounding landscape not as scenery but as a teacher, and learning not as something confined to a period or a classroom, but as something shaped by repetition, relationship, and trust.

At Gould, time in nature is not a reward. It is part of the work. A daily practice in presence and responsibility, shared across disciplines and experience levels. The confidence that grows there doesn’t stay in the mountains. It carries back into classrooms: sustained inquiry, reflection, revision, and intellectual risk-taking serve students well in demanding college environments, as well as on the mountain and in athletic competitions.

Students are not shaped by accident here. They are shaped slowly in a place designed to give them the space and guidance to grow into lives of fulfillment and purpose.

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Building Resilience:
The Legacy of True, Gehring, and Clough

Dr. John George Gehring (1857–1932) brought to Bethel a vision of wellness that was both expansive and deeply human. In his Bethel clinic, Dr. Gehring dedicated 35 years to serving patients from around the world. His work rested on a simple but demanding premise: that lasting health requires attention to the whole person.

Gehring encouraged patients to understand themselves as integrated beings, writing that “man is neither wholly an animal, an intelligence or a spirit, but all three, and he cannot hope to maintain his balance unless all three legs of the tripod which comprise his whole are recognized and used.” This approach, attentive to body, mind, and spirit, and grounded in reflection and narrative, feels strikingly modern.

Gehring’s philosophy found expression not only in words but also in daily practice. Physical activity was central to his therapeutic vision; patients were encouraged, sometimes insistently, to chop wood, garden, snowshoe, hike, and play tennis. As documented in the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society Online Collection and Catalog, “movement and labor were understood not as distractions from healing, but as essential to it.” Over time, these ideas helped shape the cultural soil of Bethel and Gould, where Gehring was a trustee and married to Dr. Tuckerman True’s daughter, Marian True Farnsworth.

Gould’s unofficial motto, “To Thine Own Self Be True,” is often traced to this same way of thinking; a belief that self-knowledge, effort, and reflection are inseparable from growth. That thread would re-emerge with particular clarity nearly a century later.

In 1983, when Bill Clough became Gould’s headmaster, he arrived with an instinctive understanding of education as a whole-person endeavor. Raised on a hilltop farm in New London, New Hampshire, Bill grew up immersed in the land—tending sheep, working with his mother’s Connemara horses, hunting, and sugaring. Like Gould’s early leaders, Dr. True and Dr. Gehring, he believed that education should shape the whole person, not just the mind. In searching for a school that prized curiosity, effort, and authentic joy over rigid rules or formulas, Bill and his wife, Ki, found Gould.

We wanted a place which de-emphasized the kinds of formulas and expectations that too often encumber and encrust school faculties, administrators, and boards of trustees, and which can pervert the sense of joy and spontaneity that forms the core of true learning. – Former Head of School Bill Clough

Bill brought intellect, athleticism, creativity, and care for students into every part of campus life. Like Gehring, Clough was known for early-morning excursions into the woods, accompanied by reluctant students, armed with splitting mauls, an axe, a chainsaw, and an old pickup truck, to fell, buck, and split firewood for the school’s woodstoves and fireplaces. There were few words spoken, just shared work, guidance in silence, and a quiet insistence that effort mattered. In these moments, students learned that adults could walk alongside them, offering trust, support, and challenge in equal measure.

Clough’s philosophy had deep roots in experiential learning. In 1960, he participated in a six-month Outward Bound wilderness expedition that showed him the transformative power of deliberate challenge in the outdoors. In 1984, he brought that vision to Gould, creating the first 10-day winter expedition for juniors, which became the genesis of the Four Point Program: a curriculum of real-world challenge, reflection, and growth.

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Hear Bill Clough and other trip leaders celebrating Forty Years of Junior Four Point

Watch the Junior Four Point Story

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Programs like Four Point give structure to growth. Students encounter difficulty, with guidance and support, as they learn to navigate hard terrain, diverse cultures, community engagement, the joy and challenge of the arts, and sometimes the harder truths about themselves. Risk is embraced. Failure is expected. What matters is how students are supported when it happens. Part of the Four Point ritual is to give each student a paracord bracelet tied with slip knots upon course completion. A recent graduate reflects, “Looking at my Junior Four Point bracelet, it reminds me not only of my accomplishments but also that I have the ability to do difficult things based on what I have control over in the present.”

At Gould, faculty are champions of students not by directing their paths, but by walking alongside them. As teachers, coaches, advisors, and dorm parents, they share their experience, passions, and care while paying close attention to who each student is becoming. Over time, their steady presence and intentional programming provide young people the confidence to take risks, reflect honestly, and begin to discover their purpose. Students are not pushed toward a single definition of success; they are supported as they grow into resilient, capable, and thoughtful adults, ready to engage the world with courage and care. This quiet, relational work is the heart of Gould’s Portrait of a Graduate.

Gould’s Portrait of a Graduate reflects a philosophy that has guided the school for nearly two centuries. Nathaniel Tuckerman True, Dr. Gehring, and Bill Clough each shaped a shared understanding of education as something lived as well as studied. From True came the belief that learning is deepest when students engage directly with the world beyond the classroom. Gehring emphasized the role of physical challenge, reflection, and adult mentorship in shaping character and judgment. Clough carried these ideas forward, designing programs like Four Point that ask students to meet real challenges with effort, awareness, and support.

That same philosophy guides Gould’s academic life. In classrooms, students are invited to wrestle with ideas as seriously as they do with experience, through sustained inquiry, discussion, revision, and reflection. Faculty design courses that value curiosity and persistence, where original thinking is expected, and intellectual risk is encouraged. Together, academic and experiential learning form a single developmental arc, aligning place, program, and people to cultivate the whole adolescent, thoughtful, resilient, and prepared to engage the world with purpose.

That commitment takes its clearest shape in the Four Point Program.

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Four Point: The Arc of Becoming 

Four Point is Gould’s signature experiential program: a four-year journey that engages students in ways the classroom alone cannot. Each March, students step away from traditional schedules and into transformational experiences that their interdisciplinary courses have prepared them for. International immersion, creative exploration, winter expeditions, and independent capstone projects invite students to reflect, connect, and test themselves in meaningful ways.

The program is intentionally designed to support holistic adolescent growth—social, emotional, intellectual, and physical—within a community where roles blur in important ways. The teacher who was guiding an AP Physics class weeks earlier may now be standing beside a student in snowshoes, navigating by map and compass. In these moments, learning becomes lived, and mentorship becomes visible.

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Four Point: From Invention to Collaboration

Eli arrived at his senior Four Point project through years of coursework and questions that wouldn’t let go. A tenth-grade observation, warmer water temperatures, and more frequent, intense rainstorms were threatening brook trout in a local river, which became a research question that consumed him. By junior year, he was experimenting with homemade water sensors. His first attempts failed: data collected without timestamps, sensors zip-tied to bricks. But each iteration taught him more.

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When senior Four Point arrived, Eli proposed designing affordable temperature-monitoring stations to help protect Maine's vulnerable trout habitat. IDEAS Center Director Billy Ayotte learned to code climate models alongside Eli and mentored him through the prototype development process. Eli’s final project demonstrated rigorous data analysis, environmental engineering, and policy argumentation at the State House. Yet the deeper growth was intellectual: Eli's thinking evolved from “my invention will solve this” to an understanding that collaboration, patience, and consensus-building are essential to any lasting solution. These are skills learned in the quiet moments of mentorship across all disciplines—the ability to listen, to revise thinking, to see problems as part of larger systems. Four Point gave Eli the structure to pursue a question over multiple years and the expectation that his work could contribute meaningfully. He now studies environmental science and policy at a leading liberal arts college, carrying forward the understanding that technical skill matters, but so does the capacity to work alongside others toward enduring solutions.

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Four Point: Mentorship Across Disciplines

Junchao arrived at Gould as a one-year experiment, only to become a four-year success story—a talented alpine ski racer from Maryland seeking space to foster his intellectual curiosity. For Junchao, that space lay within Four Point's framework for exploration.

Through art and design coursework, he developed technical skills in blacksmithing and woodworking. Summer internships in architecture and real estate shifted his thinking from “I enjoy making things” to an understanding of how creativity serves larger systems, market realities, strategy, and decision-making. Art teacher Kipp Greene pushed him to make work more complex and intentional. College counselor Maggie Davis helped him connect his experiences to a sense of purpose.

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The quiet support of mentors across disciplines made his growth possible. His ski coaches, recognizing his deepening commitment to architecture, encouraged him to pursue that passion fully, understanding that athletic excellence and intellectual development need not compete but can reinforce one another. By senior year, Junchao's architecture program portfolio demonstrated not just artistic talent but disciplined, systems-level thinking. His highly selective college acceptance reflected years of sustained inquiry: craft learned through patient mentorship, analytical thinking developed in coursework, and professional maturity gained through internships.

Gould’s Four Point provided Junchao structure to turn interest into direction, even when it meant stepping away from what others might have expected.

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Four Point: From Advocate to EMT

Sophia, whom we last met offering comfort to her former Head of School, provides a living example of this philosophy, from self-discovery to moments demanding real-world courage. Sophia has continued her work as an EMT and often sees Dave in the community. They share a bond that transcends words.

Sophia's freshman year began with frustration when COVID canceled the Four Point international trip, but her English teacher supported her creativity and courage by encouraging her to speak up. “This needs to be your fight,” he told her. With guidance, Sophia drafted a proposal, discovering her voice and agency, skills essential to later academic and leadership work. Sophomore year shifted outward as service and art projects taught her to navigate group dynamics. Junior year brought the winter expedition, where the hardest lessons were not the demanding physical exertion, but the social and emotional hurdles—learning to trust adults as guides and rely on peers. “I went into the woods a kid and came back a grown-up,” she reflects. By senior year, experiences converged with academic rigor. As a Ski Patroller, Sophia passed demanding written exams and practical assessments. Her capstone, a six-week EMT course alongside pre-med students in college, required mastering complex medical knowledge and passing a rigorous certification exam. Initially intimidated, she drew on resilience honed through Four Point and analytical discipline from coursework. Weeks after graduating from Gould, she was no longer a student but a trusted adult whose competence emerged through the intentional interweaving of intellectual challenge, experiential learning, and relentless support.

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These stories demonstrate what Four Point makes possible: curiosity, creativity, courage, and designed risk-taking within a network of support, and programs that cultivate the whole adolescent—intellectually, emotionally, physically, and socially. Academic rigor and experiential challenge are interwoven threads of the same developmental arc. A student wrestling with complex questions in a seminar builds the same analytical courage needed to navigate unfamiliar terrain. The creative risk of revising a thesis mirrors the vulnerability of stepping into leadership. Here, the influence of True, Gehring, and Clough endures: place, program, and people aligned to help young adults emerge not only resilient and thoughtful, but intellectually rigorous and analytically capable, ready to live with courage, purpose, and the skills to engage a complex world.

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Trusted Adults: Mentorship as the Multiplier 

Gould does not guarantee student success. It promises mentorship. And it begins with who we hire. Teachers, coaches, and dorm parents are selected not only for content knowledge or technical skill, but for their capacity to know students deeply, to recognize when to push and when to pause, and to guide growth through relationship. These adults are trained in adolescent development and coached to see learning as iterative and human, shaped as much by trust as by challenge.

At Gould, mentors create conditions where students are invited to extend themselves beyond what feels comfortable; whether that means winter camping for nine days, stepping into leadership on Ski Patrol, or navigating complex group dynamics far from familiar support systems. Just as importantly, those same adults stay close over time. They scaffold growth through repeated experiences, reflection, and feedback, helping students make meaning of challenge rather than simply survive it. And when focus wavers, as it inevitably does in adolescence, mentors help students refine their attention, name what matters, and reclaim agency. Sophia, Eli, and Junchao’s stories make this visible: teachers who insisted on advocacy, advisors who guided through social growth, mentors who entrusted them with real responsibility, and adults who stayed present long enough for confidence to turn into competence.

Learning happens everywhere. In classrooms. On mountains and fields and trails. In dorms, at dinner tables, on teams. And in those places, adults are learning too, watching carefully, adjusting, reflecting, growing alongside young people.

Held together by this place and these relationships, a network of trusted adults, intentionally chosen and prepared for this work, students are given more than the chance to succeed. They are given the space to grow: socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Over time, that growth becomes who they are. These are the graduates Gould sends into the world.

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Confidence, Carried Forward

Growing up at Gould rarely happens all at once. It unfolds in moments, some ordinary, some extraordinary, when a young person realizes they are capable of more than they once believed. It happens in a 24/7 boarding community, where learning does not end with the school day, and adults are present not in shifts, but in relationship. Teachers, coaches, and dorm parents live the work alongside students, sharing meals, late nights, early mornings, and the quiet accumulation of trust.

Gould does not promise a particular outcome or a scripted version of success. It promises challenge and presence: a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, an extraordinary mountain setting, and committed adults who know students well, who challenge them honestly, and who stay close long enough for confidence to take root. Over time, that continuity matters. It is what allows preparation to become instinct.

That is why, on a hot July afternoon in a hospital parking lot, when a helicopter’s blades cut through the air and nothing felt certain, a young EMT moved forward with calm authority. Sophia did not summon that steadiness out of nowhere. It was built slowly and repeatedly over years of being known, guided, and trusted in a community designed to walk with adolescents as they grow up. In that moment, Gould was present too, not as a place she once attended, but as a way of being she carried with her: grounded, capable, and ready to meet the world with confidence and care. 

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