Our Ambitions for Youth
We have ambitions for our students. Every school does. If they are not singularly unique at Ridgeview, I would nevertheless assert that they deviate from the majority’s contention about what school is for.
During a recent Headmaster’s Coffee, I was asked to write something clarifying what Ridgeview stood for. To define its purpose. To do so, it is necessary to be precise about what we mean by an ambition because there are schools that exist for the purpose of reproducing the child in the adult’s image. That is, they contrive a curriculum and ethos in which it would be improper to come to conclusions about the purposes of life or political views that are at odds with the establishment, whether those be parental or governmental.
Tradition and a respect for the family have their place, but stunting intellectual exploration or expression in an attempt to impose views, rather than presenting a plurality of views and permitting discussion and investigation with reasonable guidance, is the very antithesis of a classical, liberal arts education.
Ambition itself must be carefully defined. We do not mean, as its original Latin would have it, “soliciting of votes, canvassing, striving after popularity, desire for advancement, ostentation, pomp.” That is, however, what other kinds of education endeavor to do—they endeavor to be popular, whereas Ridgeview’s fuller motto specifically excludes this: “Veritati Virtutique Dedicatum Neque Popularitati Neque Utilitati.” Dedicated to truth and virtue, not popularity, not utility.
Instead, by ambition, we take the more modern meaning: “Strong desire for achievement, advancement, or honour,” and not of an immoderate or intemperate type; this is not lustful or incontinent ambition. Student’s who have read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics will understand what is meant here and the dangers that unrestrained ambition pose. Our ambition, succinctly stated, is not for the end of Ridgeview to be the beginning of college, but life itself and preparation for its continuation.
A writer who has resonated strongly with students in the past four or five years is Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Jewish, Austrian survivor of multiple concentration camps who passed away in 1997, but who left the world with a short book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl wrote that “everything has its value, but man has his dignity—a human being should never become a means to an end.” This is obviously not an entirely new observation, but given the context of Frankl’s life, and the little regard that life itself was given while Frankl was writing, it has a peculiar resonance, and given our largely materialistic and economic comprehension of the world all about us, it begs the question of what a person should be at their core.
Frankl wrote the following in an essay just nine months after being released from a concentration camp:
“…it all came down to the individual human being! What remained was the individual person, the human being—and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down—the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one—the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that ‘he’ had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self. So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made? It does not surprise us, because ‘existence’—to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned—is nothing other than decision.”
In some ways, Frankl’s realization is akin to one made by Stoics like Seneca and Aurelius. Daniel Coleman in writing the introduction to Frankl’s essays even writes that: “Fate is what happens to us beyond our control. But we are each responsible for how we relate to those events.” And, Frankl appears to be right: burnt down to our bare existence, we have a decision to make about who we will be.
Several years ago, I was having coffee with a friend and a parent of Ridgeview students. I was describing some of the joys and challenges of leading a school as countercultural as Ridgeview, and she said one of the most remarkable things. As an aside, one of the most humorous and remarkable things about what she said was that she saw nothing remarkable in it. In short, she said that I was hugely fortunate because there were important considerations about this decision and in how we choose the purpose we will dedicate ourselves to. First, we are fortunate if our purpose is noble, and nobility here understood to mean “displaying high moral qualities or ideals; of a great or lofty character; free from pettiness or meanness, magnanimous.” Second, if we are good at this thing, because sadly many pursue noble things without being much good at them. Third, that we enjoy this thing, because sadly many do not enjoy the thing they happen to be good at. Fourth, that this thing that is noble, that we are good at, and that we enjoy provides us with a reasonable living.
I do not know that I embody all those things as fully as she seemed to believe, and I am certain that my critics think I do not, but I do believe that she is right that it is the few and the fortunate whose lives, purposes, and decisions reflect these four principles. When I speak to students about my ambitions for them, I do not tell them to become statesman, or nurses, or lawyers, or doctors, but I do tell them this story. When it is combined with discussions about Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or Aristotle’s magnanimous man, or Aurelius’ stoicism, Ortega’s select man, or the individual in Mill, Oakeshott, or James Burnham, students begin to appreciate that they are capable of winding themselves rather than being wound by others.
So, it is that we want them to be happy, and to explore and define what it is that will bring them lasting and fully developed happiness (eudaimonia); to be capable of weathering the inevitable tragedies of life, to give to something greater than themselves, to have an awareness of a better self and to aspire to it, to be cognizant that they are suffused in meaning and that curiosity and patience and humility are the gateways to knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. That is the purpose of Ridgeview—that it is ‘college prep’ is obvious, but college itself, once one is admitted, will be little more than means to another end, and so on and on until life terminates. If this were all Ridgeview were about, it would be banal and inane.
We want for them to code computers, to build robots, to understand physics and maths, but we also want for them to look at the night sky in wonder, because wonder too is a gateway. We want for them to read literature, to sympathize with characters hundreds and thousands of years removed, and to realize that they are not so different from themselves in ways both good and bad. We want for them to see all of this as worthy in and of itself, and not solely as the means to some other end. It is art, music, literature, history, mathematical theorem and proof; it is theories, and refutations, and character studies; it is application and experience; it is the smell of the earth, the taste of the snow, the familiarity of friends and teachers, the exhilaration of competition, the elation of triumph, the despair of hurt feelings and wounded pride, the awkwardness of adolescence, the welcome comfort of good friends—Ridgeview is neither “just a school” nor a means to college admissions, but life. The living of it and a preparation for its continuation at its highest and most sublime.
If we educate mercenaries, we cannot be surprised, when in our dotage, we occupy a world shaped and created for mercenaries. We will all be victims, but of a self-created variety. If we want a world of individuals, instead of the humdrum activist playthings wound by elites and politicos; if we want a world of genuine ingenuity, wonder, compassion, and humility, instead of the “nation of shopkeepers,” England and America were ridiculed as by Napoleon, it begins here, with us, in this time and place. This is not an economic manifesto that rejects the creation of value from human thought and labor; it is a rejection that there is equal value in all value. That is not a paradox: there is a higher value than market value.
There is, in the Jewish tradition, a myth of thirty-six hidden righteous ones—the Tzadikim Nistarim. Frankl himself writes about this:
“An ancient myth tells us that the existence of the world is based on thirty-six truly just people being present in it at all times. Only thirty-six! An infinitesimal minority. And yet they guarantee the continuing moral existence of the whole world. But this story continues: as soon as one of these just individuals is recognized as such and is, so to speak, unmasked by his surroundings, by his fellow human beings, he is ‘withdrawn’, and then dies instantly. What is meant by that? We will not be far off the mark if we express it like this: as soon as we notice any pedagogical tendency in a role model, we become resentful; we human beings do not like to be lectured to like children.”
That myth has it that the role of the thirty-six is to “justify the purpose of humanity in the eyes of God.” Let us plant the seeds, model the ways, provide the cultivation, the opportunity and experiences, in the hopes that the fruits of our labors are not better cogs or implements for the designs of others, but a more humane, just, and righteous world fit to be occupied by individuals. Let us be contributors to the thirty-six, give voice to magnanimity, and be more than what the market needs—let us be an institution that prepares human beings worthy of the title he has given himself, homo sapiens—man is wise.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
