Educating For The Future

Jan. 14, 2005

Cary Academy focuses on computer learning.

James Goodnight, president and CEO of Cary, N.C.-based SAS Institute Inc., a major computer software producer, has a personal stake in American education. He and his wife along with SAS co-founder John Sall and his wife have provided financial support for the Cary Academy, a private school for grades 6 through 12 that sits on 52 acres of land donated by SAS. "Every CEO -- every company -- in this country should be concerned with our education system. Not to say that it's bad. But just to say there's a lot of improvement that could made," he states. "If manufacturing is to succeed and prosper here in America, we probably need to have [fewer traditional] workers and more machinery. And that machinery . . . takes some people with some pretty brilliant minds to work on it. [And] those are the types of people we need to be producing out of our schools and colleges," says Goodnight. "So one of my goals in setting up Cary Academy was at least to have a bunch of kids that, when they get out of high school, understand how to use a computer as a basic tool."

A computer, as he sees it, is a means of gaining access to a whole world of information, a way of writing papers and taking tests, and as a means of creating and communicating through Power Point presentations and Web sites. "This is in English and history; it's in dance. We have a very balanced school with regard to the arts and sciences," he stresses. "We really didn't want a school that was strictly for math and science." What's more, adds Goodnight, "Even though we use computers as tools, they are just that. They're a replacement for pencils and books and paper. . . . It's just putting kids in an environment like [the one] they're going to be [in] at work in the future."

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.