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Parent Dinner, 2017

Headmaster Vance Wilson delivered this address at the annual Parent Dinner on January 25, 2017.

We live in interesting times: and, oh, by the way, we’re trying to raise children. Not only to raise children but to prepare them to contribute to a world—not just to the United States—that sometimes seems soaked in anxiety and anger. Tonight, I offer four thoughts. I hope you believe they’re timely.

Let’s begin with words. I turn first to the Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. Tonight, I find apt his translation of the medieval Irish work “Sweeney Astray.” In it a cleric named Ronan uses words so powerfully his curses against Sweeney cause actual physical damage—words make boils grow on Sweeney’s skin, drive him mad and into exile, where of course he becomes a poet. Message to children: words have meaning. And they can hurt. They can raise boils on the skin. Boys—men—are fond of joking around. But we are also notorious for not being very good at reading the effect of our words. Young man, let us say, to our son, don’t fling your insults or text inappropriately to your so-called friends and then tell us, “But he’s a friend.” Or, “She knows I’m kidding. I didn’t mean anything.”

And don’t give them the excuse of bad examples from adults. So, first thought: the meaning of words matters. Care for them.

Early in my tenure, I sat at a refectory table with two alumni who had what I have since learned is a surprisingly frequent experience. Alums return to school ten to seventy years later and suddenly recall an event or story that made some kind of lasting perhaps imprint. In this case, the story was a phrase. These were students of Albert Lucas, our school head who served from 1929 to 1949 and was a World War I vet and a red-haired priest for whom “muscle” and “Christianity” were near synonyms. He pounded the phrase into his boys. At the refectory table, I expected them to say something like “soldiers for Christ!” but they looked at each other and together said, “manners maketh man.”

Sixty years later, in 2017, I open myself up to scorn. Get real, Headmaster. You’re so Establishment. Do you actually allude to a 15th-century phrase from a grammar book written by an Eton school head, of all the upper class, snobby British places? Do you endorse classicism, racism, imperialism, Downton Abbey-ism, sexism, and every other offense against right-thinking contemporaries who think manners outdated and espouse equality and equity and are willing to fight for these rights even if they must be impolite, discourteous, rude, and even violent?

No, I don’t. Well, not entirely. But our children are growing up, I argue, in a world, in our case a highly privileged world, where we feel the need to tear down, to castigate without evidence, and to scorn without any sense of familiarity. We rant with no sense of an audience, and we carry around a bag of tools in our souls called Cynicism, Scorn, Sarcasm, and Contempt. Are these the tools that help us live a fulfilled life?

Courtesy is not by default cowardice. It gives value to another person as a fellow human being, even when you passionately disagree and must discipline yourself from despising the person to whom you are courteous. For me, as a Christian, that is my obligation.

Please note that my bag of destructive tools doesn’t include skepticism: cynicism yes, but not skepticism. Skepticism can be a constructive force in a child’s life. In many ways, it’s the beginning of true scholarship. In many ways, it is necessary to strong faith. Today it’s essential for growing up in an age when information is cheap and getting cheaper. In the last year alone, studies done about children and the Internet repeatedly show they still struggle to question the authenticity of the information they are accessing. We say, “Don’t believe everything you read,” or “fakery is big business,” and yet lots of us, adult, too, don’t want to expend the energy to validate a claim. We’d rather pontificate without evidence. Message to children: please be skeptical and use your skepticism—it takes hard work—to construct well-meaning and helpful wisdom.

Finally, this: I prepare for these speeches by pulling out past failed drafts. I can’t give this speech, for eighteen years it appears, without repeating my belief that loving a child means disciplining a child. Sorry, but I repeat myself: Loving a child means disciplining a child. Indulgence is best occasional, and all the sweeter if it is, but discipline is daily, attentive, loving, often humorous, and always well meaning. To be a healthy adult, we must discipline ourselves. Not disciplining our child with love creates, in my opinion, a discourteous, spoiled adult.

So: four thoughts tonight. Words matter: care for them. Courtesy is not outdated, nor is it cowardice. Skepticism is essential to scholarship and wisdom. Discipline is a form of love. And may God be with us and with this school.
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Located in Washington D.C.,  St. Albans School is a private, all boys day and boarding school. For more than a century, St. Albans has offered a distinctive educational experience for young men in grades 4 through 12. While our students reach exceptional academic goals and exhibit first-rate athletic and artistic achievements, as an Episcopal school we place equal emphasis upon moral and spiritual education.