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A Message from Ross Thomas, High School Principal
A good education is a subject almost as big as life itself … and almost as difficult to write about in a small space. Two points, however, might be enough to suggest Valley Catholic's character.
The tragedy of our time is the starving of young people's imaginations and spirits by a mass culture more brutal, sterile, addictive, and intrusive than ever before. Our young people's minds and hearts should be custom-made from their own work, play, and reading, not, as they now often are, mass-produced for them by people who will sell them almost anything by almost any means. Parents of young children dream of the great things they will do, of the great people they will become. Children's dreams for themselves are often even nobler. But these dreamed-of lives and dreamed-of people often disappear into a mass culture that appeals only to our grosser natures, a mass culture very difficult for young people to resist … and impossible for them to resist if they have not been given more satisfying and humane values and tastes. We cannot be argued away from the crass and sterile; we must be given better.
Here lies the duty of every school, but smaller schools determined to use their size well are most able to fulfill it. We can't love our neighbors if we don't love ourselves, and we can't love ourselves if we haven't been valued as individuals and given adequate opportunity to prove ourselves to ourselves. Inactive spectators become jealous of the active … and unhappy. But there's little jealousy among people who have taken advantage of the opportunity their school gave them to earn their own respect. A smaller school can hope to give every one of its students reason to get up each morning excited about his or her own day, his or her own life. Schools that approach this ideal are essentially different from those in which four-fifths of the students watch one-fifth really live. People happy with themselves support each other, and the support of a whole schoolful of happy people for each other is true school spirit.
A great school takes all its students seriously, as individuals, students, artists, athletes. It works constantly to feed their best natures, to educate their imaginations and offer every sort of activity that might make their dreams even nobler, more exciting … and true. It tries to ensure that when its students get together to talk they have something worth talking about, experiences, ideas, and hopes to share and delight in.
There's no shortage of opportunities for real accomplishment, for anyone, at a great smaller school. No one needs to tell you to feel good about yourself as you walk off the track after a dozen hard quarters or after playing perfectly a concerto that took you six months to learn or wrestling your thoughts into five pages of good prose. After a few such accomplishments you know there's more to you than there was. Of course young people talk about the newest CDs—we all live with such small daily pleasures—but they need more profound pleasures too. The abilities required to build a deeply satisfying intellectual, cultural, and spiritual life are the real life skills, and it's the teaching of them to as many of its students as possible that should be a school's first business.
My second point concerns more closely the spiritual side of Valley Catholic. A well-known headmaster recently wrote in a national magazine, "Presenting 'reality' is an empty educational goal if our reading lists and assignments produce disillusioned, dispirited students." No kidding … and good for him for saying so. One of the most famous professors of the last century wrote in his preface to the Oxford Book of English Verse, "I am at a loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement … What are our poets of use—what are they for—if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?" The same question must be asked of our schools, especially of Catholic schools, whose deepest belief is in ultimate daylight. What are they for if not to give students the world only education can give, a world of delight, hope, faith, a view of life that will be a permanent possession because based on permanent, essential, universal human values and loves, not merely on reaction to current social or physical problems or on the vain "morose disparagement" of secular hopelessness? The most important thing I can say about education is that students need to be given joys, not fears. We are able to laugh because we believe in the laughter at the heart of things, because we believe that life is a divine comedy, not an absurd irony. Our classes must be based on this belief.
Valley Catholic, then, builds doers, not watchers, and teaches joys, not fears.