"To-morrow I cease to be a puppet, and I become a boy like you and all the other boys."*
We teach boys. That’s what we do. And we want our boys to think for themselves. And we want that thinking to be rooted in and guided by “strong values”—our school-wide theme this year, found in the last line of the mission’s second paragraph. In keeping with the school’s classical tradition, these strong values are shaped at Saint David’s by the cardinal and theological virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and courage, along with faith, hope, and charity. To many Western philosophers, possession of these virtues makes a person good, happy, and thriving. Something we want for all of our sons.
Today, even talking about “virtue” can feel a touch anachronistic, but should it? The word comes from the Latin virtus, meaning strength, or excellence. To the Ancient Greeks, these virtues represented a kind of moral power, a state of character or moral habit that could only be cultivated through education and practice. A person who possessed this habit (a given virtue such as temperance, or courage, for example), was a person used to exercising patience or acting bravely. Because these virtues were so ingrained, whenever a challenge was encountered, the default response—patience, bravery—kicked in, similar to a physical reflex when touching something hot. The ancients believed that these moral reflexes were indispensable to living a moral life.
As the school opens its 74th year, we do so clear-eyed about our mission’s importance and relevance in the 21st century. There was a time—and some still believe it remains that time—when it was thought that children should receive the world as passive entities, that the role of education is to have them adapt to the world, conforming completely to accepted norms and customs. Given this thinking, an educated person “fits” perfectly into a particular, “specific” definition of the world. However, others would argue that “education is not the filling of a pail,” as Yeats writes, “but the lighting of a fire.”
True to mission, Saint David’s strives for a balanced approach, with a slight leaning toward the “lighting of a fire.” While we want our boys to recognize and appreciate cultural norms and customs, we don’t want this to come at the expense of not recognizing and appreciating who they are, their own uniqueness and individuality. We also want them to be open-minded regarding the fact that societal norms and customs can evolve and change with time. Saint David’s boys distinguish themselves through their quiet confidence, their humility, politeness, and well-roundedness—strong character traits that can never be allowed to expire. We want Saint David’s boys to be men of the world, Renaissance men, good men… and we want that educational fire within each of them—the one ignited by our incredible faculty—to burn long and strong.
When the shiny black doors of Saint David’s opened wide for the first time on February 5, 1951, our ten bold founders knew exactly what they were doing. In the storefront windows of 1940s New York, signs read: “Catholics need not apply”... and it was not only to jobs and clubs, but also to the independent, private schools of the day. Undeterred, these audacious lay families took it upon themselves to do the unthinkable—start their own school.
By the late 1940s, our founders had incorporated as the Thomas More Foundation with the singular purpose of establishing a school to “provide a sound, substantial education for the growing boy, equal to the best to be derived from institutions of a similar level,” in an atmosphere based on their faith tradition.
It wasn’t that the parish schools of the day were not great schools, it’s that the founders wanted an education that wasn’t “parochial,” which encouraged and cultivated a critical, independent kind of mind that was also guided by faith. So opposed was the church of the day to this kind of “independent” thinking that upon learning of the “rebels’” purchase of 12 E 89th Street, the diocese purchased a Dutch Reformed church that was on the market just down the road. They then consecrated it a Catholic church and named it, you guessed it, St. Thomas More.
Undeterred and steadfast in their conviction to remain completely independent, the founders decided to change the name of their new school so there could be no confusion. And so it was that at mass one sleepy Sunday morning not too soon after, upon hearing Psalm 89 where God anoints the young David leader of his people—unable to ignore the coincidence of having just purchased the townhouse on 89th Street—the founders renamed their young school Saint David’s.
That audacious spirit and those founding ideals continue to inform our program to this day. Supported by four distinct and equal pillars—the academics, athletics, arts, and spirituality—Saint David’s cultivates in its boys the independent, critical mind so important to our founders.
However, our program doesn’t leave its focus simply on the pillars, it constantly challenges our boys to find the good within each, adding a values layer to everything we do and teach. As a faculty, we constantly ask the boys to examine where the good in “academics” lies. Is it in earning straight As, being top of the class, having the most right answers? No. The good lies in the question as much as it does the answer, especially in learning how to ask the right question, at the right time, of the right source. And it lies in constantly digging deeper for the truth; never being completely satisfied or “done.” The good in academics lies in scholarship. In “athletics,” does the good lie in being the fastest, strongest or having the best record at season’s end? No. It lies in honoring the game, your opponents, the officials, and your teammates. It lies in how you win and how you lose; in sportsmanship. In the arts, it’s not fundamentally about being the best or most skilled painter or illustrator, the good lies in the capacity to appreciate beauty and recognize that true beauty lies in truth and the truth isn’t always pretty. It lies in the aesthetic. In spirituality, the good doesn't lie in being a better or more devout Christian, Islam, or Jewish believer than the person next to you; it lies in what you choose to do and whether that choice elevates others or diminishes them.
“The ultimate test of a moral society,” Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us, “is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.” The world we are leaving our children needs more people of character. With the virtues as our guiding framework, our exploration of strong values this year at Saint David’s will help our boys further hone their character.
When our sons are young, they often reflect back to us, “puppet” what they see and hear from us and the world around them. As they grow, we want them to think for themselves, to make thoughtful, informed decisions about what they believe, how they want to act, who they want to befriend, and what paths they want to follow. In his poem “On Children,” Khalil Gibran reminds us that:
“Our children are not our children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through us, but not from us.
And though they are with us, yet they belong not to us, we may give them our love
but not our thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.”
Their own thoughts indeed. That’s what we owe them, the ability to think, act, and function with independence and hope, just like Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. There was a reason the gods of the ancients allowed Pandora to trap hope in her box after mischief, sorrow, plague, chaos, and disease all escaped—it was the only thing left when all else in the world seemed lost. And now, as we embark on our 74th year, let our boys represent our collective hope for a better world tomorrow grounded in the strong values they absorb from their teachers and families at Saint David’s today.
*Carlo Collodi (1883), The Adventures of Pinocchio