primary virtues

Watching young children learn and grow is a singular privilege. How much more is this privilege evident but at Townshend International School where the children come from many countries and cultures and speak many languages. Practicing virtues becomes so much more meaningful when we must be patient and loving toward someone who does things so differently than us and who can’t understand what we are saying. Tolerance takes on new meaning when faced with a friend who has different ideas and opinions and thinks in ways incomprehensible to you. The beauty of our little school is such that we take a child from a very young age and plant him in fertile soil enriched with tongues and civilizations both near and far. This little one grows knowing not that his classmate is so different from himself only that he has many friends from whom he learns great things and is thus a richer person indeed. I am constantly floored as I see the earnest fluidity with which these gorgeous creatures accept the many differences and the new experiences and the plethora of new vocabulary.  Illustrating this point, I was asking one of our Danish students to say something to me in his mother tongue. Just as a curiosity, I was thinking to myself. Though unintelligible to me, it was not lost on his German friend who immediately responded in Danish. Staring at them both with mouth agape, I asked how he understood. He answered me astutely, “He is my friend, of course I learned to speak Danish.”

For if we are friends the work ceases to be arduous and becomes for us a joy.