Sameness and Change
To claim that we are ready to begin Ridgeview’s twenty-second academic year is too bold a statement. Some of us are ready, some of us only in some ways, and many of us yearn for summer to linger awhile longer. Nevertheless, we return to an activity—the education of adolescents—that has change and transience as its only permanent features. Even if Ridgeview itself were to remain as some unaltering monolith, the nature of growth in all its facets is reminiscent of a fragment from Heraclitus that comes to us through Plato: “One cannot step twice in the same river.” Change is not only a feature of the world, but an inevitable feature of those participating in it.
Ridgeview will again take up the great challenge of teaching youth to recognize and seek out truth, beauty, and goodness. In a world alight with distractions, controversy, and incivility, I believe that this remains as noble an endeavor as ever it was, though perhaps now one with more urgency than before. Of course, even if we are persisting amidst a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung, we must persist as happy warriors if our message is to find a home in those we teach. For instance, in a popular culture in which reading or the attention span for it seems to be waning, we have a Mrs. Hitchman who joyfully and patiently teaches young people to read thereby providing a gift that will make the world accessible long after the lessons themselves have faded. As penmanship deteriorates into incoherent scribbling with the ubiquity of keyboards, that there is a Mrs. Hornback who can show us the beauty and importance of a handwritten note is a boon. That a person such as Mrs. Carvalho exists to not only teach students knots and how to start their fires on a cold winter night, but to look skyward and pause to admire and appreciate the beauty of this world is something we should avail ourselves of the opportunity to recognize and be grateful for. Many live with less. Despite our frustrations about that ever-present and accursed chasm between what is and what we would have liked to have been, we are, in all our blessings, a happy and fortunate few.
Change, though, is hard. As the English priest of the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker, noted, “Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” When this change is external, a change to systems or institutions, this is fairly obvious; however, when it is change within us—as one philosopher put it, “the rearrangement of our mental furniture,” it introduces a kind of turmoil. America’s blue-collar philosopher, Eric Hoffer, described this as every new adjustment being “a crisis in self-esteem.” Consider the mixed look on the face of every student before school recommences: it is worry and excitement and much else. It is the foreknowledge of impending change. This crisis is not, however, limited to the internal workings of students. Parents too, and teachers too if to a lesser extent, watch with concern as childhood years slip by and are gone forever with all they have been or might have been. There is a sorrow in this as described by Anatole France: “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die in one life before we can enter into another.”
What, then, is to be done? Cherish this time and all the seasons of your life. Be involved. Read the book, take time for the conversation, listen to one another, choose better things over easier things, do not “kill time” with distractions, but fill your hours with substance. This is easier said than done for life intrudes, but despite all of Ridgeview’s busyness and the hard work of homework, we do try to make this easier. There is that bugbear homework, but even it has great meaning. There are hard books, hard subjects, hard lessons, hard hikes, hard physical tasks, but all that hardness makes each of us who is willing to take up those challenges better. There are truths we know at nine o’clock in the evening that we would be better for remembering at six o’clock the following morning. It was Sir Thomas More who famously quipped that “no man gets to heaven on a featherbed.” Being alive, if you are going to be productive and purposeful about it, is no easy thing, but worthwhile things rarely are.
Ridgeview stands as a challenge, perhaps sometimes even as a provocation, to everyone who passes through its doors: its students, certainly; its faculty and staff, absolutely; its parents, inevitably. Interestingly and importantly, it is a challenge replete with opportunities. One can learn Latin or Greek, study history, visit with other parents about the school and important texts over a cup of coffee, observe a class, chaperone an overnight trip, coach a sport, and most importantly, be present for the greatest, and most harrowing, adventure of all, watching our children metamorphize from babbling toddler to (mostly) self-sustaining adults. I look forward to helping Ridgeview persist in providing all of this for each of you, and I am tremendously grateful for a stellar faculty and parent community.
Thank you all for being here!
D. Anderson
Headmaster