On Doubt and Passion

To all of you, whose passion for your school, your people and your mission drives you, I send my best wishes for your success this year, however you choose to define it. That is one of our secrets, isn’t it—that our success rises from our passion for this paradoxical and uncertain process of educational leadership.

The fact that we lack a guiding template serves not to discourage us, but rather to fuel our passion and gives us the courage to doubt (ourselves most of all!). So we constantly grow and adapt and, we hope, become worthy of inspiring our students. If students are inspired by us, and I believe they are, it is not because they admire our grasp of ever-changing technology, or our depth of specialized academic knowledge, or our grasp of curriculum theory.

We inspire students because they see us doing what we ask them to do: to doubt, and to challenge uncertainty with courage and passion. I was reminded of the importance of this recently when one of my students from 30 years ago tracked me down via LinkedIn and came to visit me.

After catching up on the intervening years, he paused, then said he wanted to thank me. I was lost. I could not recall anything I had done important enough for him to remember all these years, or to travel 800 km to tell me. He said two things: that I had believed in him enough to hold him passionately, at times loudly accountable for his responsibilities as captain of the school’s rugby team, and that (unbeknownst to me at the time) he had lost his father in his final year of high school.

Seeing me agonize over, and then make, some difficult decisions had later helped guide him in making his own. I had no idea I had become a mentor. All I had done is what I am sure you do every day: try to understand, support, and do what is right. After 30 years I discovered I had made a difference in his life.

We all have heard, or will hear, a similar story. And we never stop; our passion and our capacity for doubt continue. So this year, I would like to share two thoughts, expressed by poets more eloquent than I. The first, from Gabriel García Márquez: “I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.” The second, from Leonard Cohen: “Love’s the only engine of survival.”

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