Today we opened the school's 73rd year .....Below, I share thoughts from my Opening Letter which introduced our school-year theme, kindness.
While on the rocky shores of Lake Como late this summer, enjoying family time before dropping my daughter off for study abroad, I couldn’t help but reflect upon my childhood on the banks of the mighty Clarence River. Ahh, the thoughts that race through a boy’s mind when he is playing on, in, or staring out over water—as Longfellow reminds us: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will” and sometimes, like William Kamkwamba’s parents**, we have to help our boys harness that wind.
It’s not enough in the 21st century to be bright, intellectually engaged, physically active and healthy, and aesthetically aware, our boys also need to be spiritually attuned—people of character, respectful and appreciative of difference, connected to a sense of the greater good and grounded in a strong sense of who they are, what they believe, and why they are here. The education of a boy’s character is the whole work of the school. It is the reason, I would argue, we do school. Character is not achieved through divine providence, but through the quality and consistency of what our boys choose to do. For a boy to thrive in his 21st-century world, he must learn to be a man who believes that his highest obligation is not to himself, but to others.
As we embark on our 73rd year, Saint David’s remains focused on teaching boys to think critically, debate intelligently, and act respectfully and responsibly no matter his or others’ belief systems, race, identity, cultural background, or economic status. To help boys develop strong character, we will concentrate even more on developing moral apprenticeship through Sophrosyne, Chapel, and religion programs, providing our boys with lived examples of character traits that include: an openness to the world, a consciousness of right and wrong, a tendency toward extraversion (in the sense of looking to connect with others), and a constant search for ways to find agreement and build consensus. We will use our traditions to help reinforce the importance of manners and social graces, compassion, listening, a willingness to be open-minded, humble, flexible, and engaging—in a word, we will focus on kindness, this year’s school-wide theme.
Found in the mission’s third paragraph “kindness” speaks to the core essence of a good man or a gentle-man. The founders of our great school did not articulate that they be perfect men, but rather… “good men.” Above all, a good man is kind (gentle and respectful). He is a man of character who possesses a certain practical wisdom—and that wisdom is earned, not taught. A boy is not born with it. To develop it, he must learn to combine moral will (a desire to do good) with moral skill (the ability to do good); and both need to be actively modeled, taught, and celebrated. This is best achieved in a community grounded in kindness.
Unfortunately, the broader popular culture does not celebrate this notion of kindness so much today; instead, it advocates its antithesis. This makes our community’s focus on the core ideal this school year even more important and timely. It is no secret that we live in an increasingly agnostic, secularizing age, and it’s for this reason that spirituality, informed by a faith tradition, can help us define kindness and what good looks like. If we want our boys to fulfill their potential, to live full, productive, good lives, they must feel wanted, loved, and cared for. A tool like kindness from our founding faith’s framework can serve to guide our Sophrosyne health and wellness curricula, advisory programs, religion and world-religion courses, and other programmatic initiatives that cultivate the spiritual dimension of a boy’s experience, helping guide his moral development and his social-emotional health. Saint David’s is aware that cultivating spirituality is not dependent on a particular religion or philosophical school of thought—our community is made up of many—but it helps to have one to frame curricular goals and educational experiences without proselytizing or evangelizing.
Strong character is also cultivated when a boy is held accountable for his actions and behavior, and where expectations for both are held high, but where he is allowed to learn and grow from his mistakes. It is often said our children are defined by the stories we tell about them. They become who we say they are. It’s important to be conscious of this and allow our children, and their classmates, the repeated opportunity to learn from their mistakes, to grow. Too often we harken back to previous misdeeds, not allowing for or noticing how our boys have changed.
In the spirit of our school-wide theme, this summer I received a letter from the director of Maison Zola – Musée Dreyfus just outside Paris. He was inquiring about our Chapel’s 16th century stained glass windows depicting the Golden Legends story of Mary Magdalene. Saint David’s holds six of the original eight glass panels of the story (all registered with the World Monuments Fund). The school acquired the windows through a 1958 bequest by Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, III, whose boys are alums. It would have been easy to ignore the request for images and information, but in the spirit of kindness, we responded, and it subsequently shone a whole new light on the story of the windows.
The school had long believed the provenance of the windows to be the South of France, sometime in the 1500s, but it turns out that the famous French novelist and supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, Emile Zola, owned the windows from 1890 through 1903. Apparently, Zola purchased them at auction after the original chapel that housed them—the Chapel of the Madeleine in Malestroit, Brittany, France—became disused. The Malestroit Chapel was originally an ancient leper hospital that was converted to a priory in 1129. Its claim to fame, apart from originally housing our windows in the 1500s, is that it was the site of France’s Philip VI and England’s Edward III 1343 signing of the Truce of Malestroit during the Hundred Years’ War. We all felt great satisfaction having filled in a few more of the missing pieces in the stained glass windows’ story. This small example of kindness proves Maya Angelou’s words true “... people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I remember the gleams and glooms that dart
Across the school-boy’s brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song
Sings on, and is never still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” *
The crystal clear waters of Lake Como reflected back the memories of youth this summer, reminding me that a boy’s will is the wind’s will and the darting thoughts of youth are indeed, long, long thoughts; so, let’s do all we can to ensure that these thoughts and that that will all blow toward kindness. Our boys deserve nothing less.
* Excerpt from My Lost Youth by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
** The Boy Who Harness the Wind, 2019