A Time of Revelry
“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. While it is not at all what Eliot intended, this line comes to mind each spring when the pace of the work feels relentless. Fortunately, it is a bit like a duck swimming about: the feet are paddling like mad beneath the water and all seems serene above the surface. Parents routinely comment how well things seem to be going in classrooms, on class trips, and all the rest, while faculty and administrators fret and worry that there is too little time to do too much work. In recalling Eliot’s line and despairing a little, I try also to recall the following passage from Seneca.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
Seneca’s is a hard lesson to live in the moment rather than only recognize the truth of it upon reflection. However, when I reflect on what the students have accomplished in just the past month, I am proud of them and impressed with us. To take only the most recent thing that comes to mind—the musical, Mary Poppins. The number of people, both adults and students, involved in that production, or that a school our size could carry it off the way they did, is stunning. We saw not only the conspicuous, onstage talent, but the behind-the-scenes leadership that marks Ridgeview out for a kind of multifaceted distinction. The success was not just singing, playing an instrument, dancing, acting, make-up, costumes, set building and scene changes, lighting and sound—it was, of course, all of this, but it was also nearly a hundred people making sacrifices, adapting to unforeseen changes, and contributing their time, talent, money, passion, and energy to something I hope will provide students with a sense of what great things can be achieved and what happy memories those victories will bring.
This is also the time of year in which I begin getting a bit wistful about the seniors. Perhaps it is because my own moral philosophy course with them has come to an end, and I am more conscious of how my time with them is concluding. There are happy moments to come such as the senior banquet and the senior ruck, the latter event being the one I most look forward to. When it comes, the tests, the performances, the college applications and scholarships, the leaving exam, the senior thesis presentations—most of the stress is past, and we can sit out beneath the stars and around a campfire laughing at our idiosyncrasies, our folly, and reveling in the time we’ve had together. In our busyness, and we cannot help but be busy, we tend to miss the true spirit of the season.
As I was preparing to rehearse with one of my senior thesis advisees a couple of weeks ago, we stopped at a locked door to the auditorium. An elementary teacher was happening by, and she saw the student, intuited what was happening, and unlocked the door for her. I trailed behind the student into the auditorium and noticed she looked a little misty eyed. I said, “What?! Why are you nervous? This is just a rehearsal.” She replied, “I’m not nervous. It’s surreal that my first-grade teacher just let me into the auditorium to practice my senior thesis. It’s all coming to an end.” It hit me too—the grandness of this adventure is more than an education and Ridgeview is more than a school.
As we passed into that auditorium, we passed a plaque on the wall with an inscription from Plato that reads, in its English portion,
Every single one of us has to give his undivided attention – to the detriment of all other areas of study – to trying to track down and discover whether there is anyone he can discover and unearth anywhere who can give him the competence and knowledge to distinguish a good life from a bad one, and to choose a better life from among all the possibilities that surround him at any given moment. He has to weigh up all the things we’ve been talking about, so as to know what bearing they have, in combination and in isolation, on living a good life. What are the good or bad results of mixing good looks with poverty or with wealth, in conjunction with such-and-such a mental condition? What are the effects of the various combinations of innate and acquired characteristics such as high and low birth, involvement and lack of involvement in politics, physical strength and frailty, cleverness and stupidity, and so on. He has to be able to take into consideration the nature of the mind and so make a rational choice, from among all the alternatives, between a better and a worse life.
Every year, for the past twenty-two graduating classes, seniors have been asked to reflect on their educations and their lives and spend a year contemplating a single question: what is essential to the good life? They have an advisor they worked with weekly, they read, reflect, contemplate—they try, in short, to determine what practical consequence their education will have on the way they live their lives, the people they are, and the ones they wish to become. It is an incredible thing to ask of a person, and that they write a 7,000-word essay on the topic and present and defend their answers to an audience comprised of teachers, students, family, and friends makes the whole project all the more incredible.
If you have never attended a thesis, you should know that you are welcome to do so. In fact, if you have an elementary student or a middle-school student, I encourage you to do so. Four of our seniors have been at Ridgeview since kindergarten, and eight have been with us for ten years or more. Hearing Mr. Binder note the number of performances students have been a part of on Saturday night reminded me of our ambition to be the sort of place one begins and ends their primary and secondary education. And, witnessing all of the ways in which students mature and develop, from learning to read to delivering a senior thesis, from having a placeholder morality to having a conscientiously scrutinized one, from trying and failing to trying and flourishing, the senior thesis is an important exhibition of accumulated skills and mindsets.
We hope you’ll consider joining us to celebrate these students, and revel as we do in the remarkable things they have accomplished, not only this past year, but over the course of their young lives.
D. Anderson
Headmaster