Kindness
Mr Geoff Lancaster | Principal | Grammar News | 18 February 2022
This week, Tara and Nick (our 2022 Senior School Captains) introduced a theme to our weekly assemblies in the Senior School. Their motivation is to provide an intentional focus each week on areas of School culture that they want to celebrate and encourage, which will strengthen School spirit and a sense of belonging and community. It was fitting that the first theme chosen was kindness.
Over the next week, our Captains are planning to greet students at the School gate with ideas of ways to show kindness each day. Kindness takes thought and deliberate action. A framework developed by researchers McCrindle shows kindness is outworked in three key virtues; empathy, altruism and reflection. This research highlights that kindness helps to give people a sense of belonging and connection to others.
We can show kindness in the words we use and even our tone of voice. Kindness is thinking about different perspectives and including others. Kindness is assuming the best of others even when we feel wronged. It is helping others, for example, holding a door open, or helping to pick something up that has been dropped. Kindness may be by getting alongside a friend or peer and showing them that you see them and care for them.
I took the opportunity at Assembly to tell our students a question I ask when I interview students and staff who are wanting to join the School community. The question is - “How will St Luke’s be a better School because you are here?” It is easy for students to speak about opportunities they are looking forward to at St Luke’s but usually more difficult for them to articulate what they will bring to strengthen our community. My favourite answer from a potential student is, “I am kind to other people."
The ancient Greek storyteller Aesop said, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Similarly, a well-known passage in Galatians, chapter 5 says:
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things, there is no law.”
Despite this ancient wisdom, there seems to be a belief in our culture that this great virtue of kindness is essentially a consolation prize, only celebrated in absence of other strengths that are more highly sought after. In a school context, this may be by holding in higher esteem academic prizes over community service or citizenship awards.
Kindness is not the consolation prize - it is a strength that builds a culture of inclusion and collaboration, where it is safe to take risks. These are the very 'human' attributes that are needed to flourish in a world with information at our fingertips yet constant change due to technological disruption. I encourage you to celebrate kindness and to ask your child, “how did you show kindness to someone today?"