Cultivating the Best Kind of Brand
The late cultural historian Warren Susman argued that sweeping social changes in the first decade of the 20th century—deepening industrialization, migration to cities, the rise of both retail commercial enterprises and the legal, finance, and advertising professions which supported them—produced a different understanding of the “self” in relation to society. A premium was placed on making a good impression, on standing out, on showing instantly that one was special or different. In Susman’s view it was a shift from a “culture of character,” with its emphasis on citizenship and integrity, to a “culture of personality,” where distinction was created through individual magnetism and creativity. The traditional concern with duty and private commitment was replaced by a more modernized conception of personal dynamism and public performance.
This evolution came to mind for me this summer, as I attended a professional development conference. Of the five keynote speakers I heard, at least two of them made the concept of personal “brand” central to their remarks, talking about the importance of teachers cultivating an image of being easy to work with, of being relevant to young people, of having a certain kind of dynamism if they were going to succeed with “today’s students.”
The speakers’ laser-like focus on personality traits as essential to teaching success grabbed my attention. We are a century past the inflection point Susman identified, and forces that would emphasize the primacy of personality—forces like social media, mass advertising, and popular entertainment—make the “personality” as much a marketing tool as an authentic emanation of the self. We may emphasize “brand” at every turn, and when we do, I suspect that we are both perverting the benefits of personality and completely neglecting the virtues of character.
Maybe I’m getting old, but I wonder about the costs of such an insistent emphasis on image, at least at a school with Browning’s mission and values. It’s one thing for a market society to herald the importance of appearances; it’s another thing entirely for a learning community to do so. When we encourage our boys to consider the place of honesty, curiosity, dignity, and purpose in their lives, we aren’t offering these values as brands, but rather as internalized dispositions that constitute a full and flourishing life. When we emphasize courage and compassion and integrity, we recognize those elements not simply as things that we should sometimes do, but as characteristics of who we mean to always be. And when we commit to knowing and loving our boys, we aren’t talking about an engagement with their “brand;” no, we are talking about embracing the essence of them, their deepest character along with their abiding individual personality. We have to encourage our boys to pursue and adopt lives of authenticity and wholeness, ones which are built and revealed over time, which aspire to align values with action, and which seek the consistent expression of intellectual and ethical virtues. And we certainly cannot offer this encouragement if, as teachers and coaches and mentors, we are not modeling it and living it ourselves. The best kind of “brand” is the kind of integrity which is compelling and trustworthy.
As we embark upon our great school journey of 2024-25, I think we also do well to recognize that there are too many societal forces which encourage superficiality over depth, quick fixes over sustained growth, and surface over substance. It’s our job as educators to stand as a bulwark against such diminution of the self, in the name of actualizing our boys’ wonderful potential and fostering enduring human qualities that are truly worth celebrating. At Browning, we’re guiding our boys to become men of character and personality; our boys deserve both, and so does our world.