Thanksgiving and Fostering Gratitude
“Now, what do you say?”
If you’ve been a caregiver for a child, there may be a good chance that you’ve employed a variant of this phrase. (You may recall hearing the same thing yourself in earlier days!) As teachers, parents, elders—anyone charged with guiding social development--we want our young kids to be polite, and we may coach them accordingly, often in very direct terms. Perhaps recalling our own childhoods, we marshal this familiar etiquette cue to prompt our children to say “thank you” for benefits received, kindnesses done, and recognition given. A cynical line of analysis would suggest that this is all just performative and self-referential parenting (“Come, see what a thoughtful child I have raised!”), but I disagree; indeed, we most often build dispositions through first establishing habits, and actively encouraging the practice of politeness in our children can have very real social and relational benefits.
And so it is with a great many things that we want our kids to learn. At Browning, we often introduce a concept or practice that begins at the level of imitation, repetition, or routine, in order to provide the cornerstone, confidence, and capacity to develop higher expression, awareness, and understanding of the idea of activity at hand. It is not likely that boys will become strong mathematicians if they do not have rudimentary multiplication tables committed to memory. Students learn the names of all the members of their classroom as a prerequisite to cultivating friendships. An early Latin student may decline verbs ad infinitum until they are automatic. We equip our Lower School guys with a chant to inculcate shared definitions of our core values of honesty, curiosity, dignity, and purpose. In a sense, these are all the pedagogical equivalents of “Now, what do you say?”: The starting points, the building blocks that are often necessary for the construction of something intellectually and emotionally larger.
But we also know that our students—and we who care for them—cannot be seduced into thinking that starting points represent either the totality or possible difficulty of learning. A boy might find it comparatively simple to memorize 9 x 7, or to know all his classmates’ names, or to figure out the second-person plural, or to rattle off definitions of core values. Yet this doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a short step to algebraic reasoning, to deep friendships, to Latin fluency, or to an abiding ethical identity. These goals oblige more than memorization and recapitulation; indeed, their full appreciation ordinarily requires a rich, diverse roster of learning experiences that call upon the skills of interpretation, reflection, evaluation, conversation, and revision. This is how we deepen knowledge into understanding; this is how we transform an idea into part of one’s very being.
“It is built through experience, reflection, and self-awareness, and transforms the notion of “thank you” from something that we say in a moment into something that makes appreciation part of who we fundamentally are.”
And I think this is worth remembering as we enter our season of Thanksgiving. As much as we value politeness, it’s really a preamble to something more substantial that we’re seeking for our kids, namely, the capacity to be grateful. And we understand that while politeness (and its imperative to recognize something beyond ourselves) may offer a strong foundation for the development of gratitude, the truly grateful person is more than simply attuned to the needs of etiquette. Gratitude involves a more stable, lasting understanding of the goodness in our lives, the manner in which that goodness was brought to us, and the reality that many of our sources of meaning come from outside ourselves. It is built through experience, reflection, and self-awareness, and transforms the notion of “thank you” from something that we say in a moment into something that makes appreciation part of who we fundamentally are. This evolution, of course, can only be accomplished with time, resolve, and practice, but the rewards of such patience are considerable. To put a fine point on it: We begin with politeness, but we hope to end with gratitude, and the rich connection and emotional fulfillment it offers.
Our mission calls our boys to “aspire to contribute meaningfully to our world.” That aspiration—with its language of contribution, of meaning, of shared (“our”) community—asks us to recognize that Browning’s value of purpose is fulfilled not only through our passions, but also by our sense that we owe something to the world beyond ourselves. It hinges, in other words, on a sense of gratitude, and all that goes into it. May our season of Thanksgiving carry all of us closer to the richest, most peaceful, most secure, most enduring realization of this essential quality of living well.