Historically, a perspective has appeared prior to the Thanksgiving Break urging everyone to celebrate this most American of holidays with the deepest, sincerest, and most unreservedly sentimental intent. This Thanksgiving, however, I look back at the break reflecting with a more contemplative frame of mind—one in which the gratitude felt was less abstract, more pragmatic, and more firmly fixed on Ridgeview’s community.

Ridgeview will resume its annual tradition of a Yule-time book flood, or Jólabókaflóðið as it goes by in Iceland. This is a tradition we embrace at our school for three reasons. First, reading, but more importantly, the promotion of reading as a joy is something that every school ought to regard as one of its foremost duties. Second, it should preference texts that it believes are more worthwhile than others—there should not be any anodyne relativism in this. Finally, it should assert that the education of students is not a thing that stands apart from the edification of the community they are drawn from.

Today marks the beginning of a new physical education initiative. Our ninth-grade students will work with faculty to complete their physical fitness assessments, and their scores will be used as a benchmark to measure their progress and improvement over the course of the coming year. Our objective is to provide every student with individualized guidance in improving their health. Not only this: our larger goal is to ensure that students possess the knowledge and mindset that allows them to make fitness a priority into their adult lives.

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.

Some, I know, lament the small number of graduates, but the capacity to know them is everything. It is like fine wine: the quality lies in the details, the nuance, the complexities. You have to know something of people in general in order to appreciate anything about anyone in particular. And, all of these students, or at least all of them who are open to the experience, are like this.

In continuing our examination of Ridgeview’s character pillars, we come now to responsibility. Our description of it reads: “I recognize that I am, in my relation with others, accountable for my actions and utterances; that circumstances will not sway me nor excuses vindicate me in conduct that is unbecoming of a person of good character.”

Each of us is drawn to pleasure and repulsed by pain. Perhaps Jeremy Bentham made too much of this observation, but it is nevertheless true that we are instinctually driven away from pain, poverty, social ostracism, poor health, shame, and fear. For a species so programmed, courage as an almost universal virtue is a bit of an oddity.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is too often cast as a mere prelude to some more magical season. Time passed, though, is still time gone, and it is for us to make of any span of life something more memorable than the humdrum of early-winter droning.

Culturally, Ridgeview is a borrower. Any individual or institution that makes a mainstay of self-examination is likely to become a borrower. It is almost inevitable that, in inquiring about themselves, they will discover that others are doing better or more interesting things, and to incorporate those things into their own doings. When an individual does this, we call it a habit; when an institution does this, we come to call it a tradition.

This time of year makes it remarkably clear how fortunate we are to live in Colorful Colorado. It also makes it much easier as a school to exhibit a life lived in harmony with the seasons…

Even in appreciation, temperance and contemplation remain virtues. Ridgeview, with its emphasis on self-reflection and rational inquiry, is loath to surrender to the sorts of emotivism that make blind reverence possible. Ridgeview, in addition to being dedicated to truth and virtue, celebrates independence, self-reliance, and freedom.

Note: This is the first in a series of perspectives on Ridgeview’s character pillars. Over the coming year, a perspective will be published on each of the character pillars and their relevance to the Ridgeview experience.