The Life of the Mind
February 24, 2020
“But what if Hobbes is correct?”
The boy’s eyes are alive with enthusiasm.
“What would that mean for Browning? Wouldn’t you need to be, you know… scarier?”
It is after lunch, and a Form VI boy is sharing his thoughts about Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the latest text in our Modern Political Thought elective. While I do not want to be the absolute ruler that what Hobbes theorizes is necessary for political communities, I am thrilled that this senior boy is so animated by something he has read for class. And I am equally thrilled that the kind of enthusiasm he is exhibiting is not an anomaly but is instead fundamental to Browning’s intellectual environment.
Persistent cultural stereotypes say that teenage boys think about and discuss little outside of video games, media, and pop culture, professional sports, and potential romantic interests. While Browning guys certainly have such conversations, I have found that they get more excited talking about the ideas, puzzles, and intellectual connections they are finding in their curricular and co-curricular pursuits. In a school of our size, I am lucky enough to sit with boys and learn what is charging them up intellectually, and I am never disappointed by what I find: A Form IV boy describing a new understanding of freedom he discovered in studying American jazz; a second grader explaining to me a series of chess opening gambits and the contexts in which he deploys them; a freshman asserting that geometric proofs “have their own kind of beauty;” a pair of students in our Advanced Genetics Research class rhapsodizing about their responsibility for seeking out their own knowledge.
“These boys have discovered a way of being that extends their reasoning and commands their interest beyond the possibilities of earning awards and championships.”
And sometimes this enthusiasm for the life of the mind is not verbalized but simply shown. When I see a dozen Middle School boys attend an optional co-ed math class that Browning hosts on Friday afternoons, or when I stumble on our robotics team tinkering in the lab late in the evening, or when I find boys sacrificing their scant free time to participate on our Mock Trial and Model UN teams, it becomes clear that these boys have not just found a subject that engages them–they have discovered a way of being that extends their reasoning, deepens their relationships with ideas, and commands their interest beyond the possibilities of earning awards and championships.
Schools produce many things—friendships, social and ethical growth, physical activity, warmth and joy—but to be truly excellent, they must be places where ideas are valued for their own sake. In great learning communities, academic accomplishment is certainly valued, yet it is also pursued indirectly, and realized as the outcome of enduring and passionate intellectual engagement. The boys of Browning are talented, curious, and insightful students—and they demonstrate this most clearly when the sophisticated ideas they encounter are not only the building blocks of achievement, but also the very things that allow boys to understand their lives and their world in new, exciting ways. This is how the life of the mind continues to flourish in our school; this is how we honor our mission to cultivate young men of excellent intellectual character.