Two Questions School Leaders Might Ask Themselves Today

I recently re-read some familiar lines by Thomas Merton, the American monk and writer, in his Letter to a Young Activist. 

Do not depend on the hope of results… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself… gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people… In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

I love this central idea that, with the perspective that comes from advancing age, we might just come to realise that our struggle - both in our personal and professional lives - is less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. 

In the energy-filled years of our youth, many of us might have fought to be heard, to have our ideas understood or even celebrated. Yet, over time, it is surely easier to see that there is no intrinsic value in any idea in and of itself, only people. An idea is only ever as good as the people it benefits.

So who are you fighting for in your school?

For me, personally, this is an extraordinarily challenging question. As educators and leaders, we can fill our days building, implementing, creating, envisioning, meeting, managing, meeting some more, and hosting a seemingly never-ending calendar of events; we can do all of this and yet still find ourselves unable to articulate how all of this activity benefits the experience of people around us.

The residual noise of all of this activity can literally drown out the voices of those who need our help the most. And perhaps, also, it distracts our attention away from another, similarly important and deeply connected question. 

Who is fighting for us?

The relevance of this second question came to me just a few days ago while listening to Marc Brackett on the Huberman Lab podcast, in which he suggested that sometimes the things that we experience at school (both now and in our past) are affecting our ability to respond or impact the experience of others, particularly students, in our school.

It made me reflect on the inevitable almost symbiotic relationship between our experience of school and the experience of those around us.

Could it be that if we feel that there is no one fighting for us, if we are feeling bullied, excluded or dehumanised in some way, then we are inevitably going to find it harder to be the agents of change and transformation that we need to be for others?

Yes, it is easy to fill our days pushing for better results, relentlessly pursuing new ideas. And there is nothing wrong with trying to do what we do better.

But maybe it is also worth pausing for a moment today to ask two simple questions:

Who most needs you to fight for them today, and who do you need to fight for you right now?

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash.