St. Gregory has chosen, under my new leadership, to embrace creating innovators as central to our mission and 21st century vision, and we appreciate  Thomas Friedman’s  inspiration.   Friedman returns to this theme today in the Times, in a column called “The New Untouchables.”

Who are they, the “new untouchables?”  They are the ones who keep their jobs in the recession;  the ones who “have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained.”

The new economy is ever more challenging, and global competition will never diminish, but “those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.”

As educators, we need to recognize that, as Friedman reports in quoting the essential Dan Pink, “So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.”

These latter are things we have always, at St. Gregory, celebrated, and they are strengths upon which we will be building to stimulate ever greater innovative thinkers among all our students.