Built on Goodwill by Brandon Crowe

This article originally appears on ON Classical Education.

“Great Hearts is built on goodwill” – for several years I’ve repeated and championed this sentiment to my colleagues. I attribute the statement to Great Hearts Co-Founder, Dr. Daniel Scoggin, and although I do not recall the circumstance in which he first uttered it to me, it’s consistent with Dan’s outlook and leadership. I see this outlook as the foundation for leading a thriving school. “Goodawill” – even with somewhat fuzzy definitional contours and imprecise applications – remains the bedrock of successful schools.

Goodwill is the determination to assume the best in another. To lay a strong foundation for a successful school, a leader simply must assume the best in another. In a school community, there are hundreds of thousands of interactions between and among humans every single day. If even a fraction of a percent of these go poorly, conflict emerges and that conflict can easily hamper the learning, the collegiality, and the trust critical to a school’s work towards the formation of young people. All too often, conflict emerges based on one’s view of why another behaved as he did. We frequently assume the worst, rather than the best. We rarely read an upset parent email with a spirit of charity and think, “Wow, that parent is really trying to figure out what is going on with her child. Let’s see how we can help!” Instead, we react to the email with increasing blood pressure and a sigh in response to the parent “who just doesn’t get it.” Candidly, the root of that same perspective (“teacher X just doesn’t get it”) was probably in the mind of the parent who sent the angry email in the first place. Nevertheless, the point is that we tend to encounter challenge and conflict with defensiveness and blame, neither of which posture is likely to lead to resolution because it bestows far less charity on another than he deserves. Cynicism might feel like private vindication but very little can be built upon it.

Simone Weil famously stated, “Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” In a posture of goodwill, the good leaders gives that sentiment a real shot. Rather than regarding the student or the colleague with suspicion we could readily form of her, we opt for the opposite. We should ask, “What would happen if I assumed positive intent about the other?” At a minimum, an assumption of goodwill should ensure that whatever the disagreement, it will be approached with far greater calm, reasonableness, and understanding. Ultimately, we are training our hearts, our instincts, and our immediate reactions to be less vicious about those with whom we work and live.

In Book VIII of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides the insight: “Friendship is reciprocated goodwill.” When any two people genuinely care about what is best for each other, they have laid the foundation for mutual support of one another. As many a mother has instructed her children, “you don’t have to like everyone, but you do have to love everyone.” This is nothing more than seeking the good for others, even if their humor or Myers-Briggs profile differs considerably from yours. This affection multiplied throughout a community by constructive leadership – especially a community of adults modeling and instructing young people in the fundaments of the good life – will work wonders.

What we model and what we directly teach about our regard for others makes a difference. To start, I have a few simple tips for school leaders to get the goodwill bubbling. First, as a professor of mine was fond of saying, “come inquiring:” if something seems off or amiss with someone, go to the person with authentic questions about the issue at hand. The point is not to engage in an inquisition that begins with preconceived notions. Instead, it’s an upgrade to the adage: “seek first to understand rather than to be understood.” The negative example that frequently comes to mind on this topic is my interactions with my own adolescent children when they are “emotionally escalated.” In their indignation, their mouths are literally open trying to form the next word on their lips, even as I am still speaking to them. They’re not listening; they’re waiting to make a point they already conceived and believe will land. Inquiry, on the other hand, tries its best not to begin with conclusions but with questions.

Listening to the other side of a conflict. The second trick to turning up the goodwill is deployed when conflict is already apparent. Simply try to channel Atticus Finch and ask, “How is the other side thinking about this matter?” And, more deeply, “WHY are they thinking about this matter in this way?” That is incredibly hard work, but it’s the kind of thing for which our students and our teachers should be well trained. They are continually working to make sense of the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of numerous historical and literary actors. Rather than considering, “Should Napoleon (or Achilles, or Hester) have done X?” the more basic question is “why did Napoleon/Achilles/Hester do X?” When we first ask the latter question, we have to think carefully and suspend initial outrage or irritation that clouds our analytical abilities. Part of what makes the effort toward graciousness so difficult is the natural tensions that exist in our hearts when it comes to engaging other people with whom we are upset. To make matters worse, our present society manifests a limited capacity for restraint. In the current moment, all positions (especially moral and political ones) tend to be advanced without moderation. Willing the good of the other is to some extent both counter-instinctual and counter-cultural.

Accountability and clemency. What I am emphatically NOT suggesting is lessening accountability. This is not a suggestion toward naivete nor toward permissiveness. In Matthew, Jesus counsels his disciples to be as “shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” We need more of both wisdom and clemency. We want to discern and understand what is going on so that we might engage and resolve matters well. We don’t help our cause (or the uplift of the school), if we err in our zeal for righteousness. Let’s be righteous and call others toward virtue in the most humane and intelligent way possible. I think of the wonderful juxtaposition of two flawed approaches to the affairs of a community in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett mocks Jane for operating with such innocence and lack of scrutiny about others that no one could ever be found at fault for anything, ever. Alternatively, Elizabeth herself must admit much later that she who prided herself on her judgment had been deluded by her own vanity. This is precisely the point – we tend to err in our judgment when our own interests are involved. We all too often invent and/or locate blame in some place other than ourselves. None of this leads to a better nor wiser community; and it certainly does not beget more intellectually and morally virtuous young people.

Good will matters in our schools because in human society we must build relational capital. Here, I don’t mean we should treat others in a manipulative, stereotypical transactional way. I mean we must build trust by showing grace, thoughtfully responding, honoring our commitments, and demonstrating that we care deeply for members of our community even when they’ve done something they ought not to have done. Gossip, challenges, and tensions know no limits in communities – which is especially true in schools. Our task is not to falter under such perennial sin, but to overcome it as individuals and as a school community.

Trust is essential to a good school. If you’ve spent any time in an awful school – or really any kind of destructive community – when things break, they break along lines of trust. This insight is neither novel, nor my own. Patrick Lencioni, and others, identify trust as the foundation for all positive functioning of communities. Part of what makes this observation so insightful is how readily apparent it is within teams, between individuals, and among peers. If one does not start every working relationship from a place of goodwill, and if people do not believe in the goodwill of the other, very little that is positive will emerge. Distrust is bad for companies and absolutely devastating for academies born to enrich the lives of young people. The alternative is an amazingly compelling prospect – what if our leaders, neighbors, churches, and our families started from a point of assuming the best? How much more flourishing would we observe and experience? The school built on goodwill will see its share of challenges, but such obstacles will be capable of being engaged because the orientation of the leaders and subsequently the children and parents will be one of a human push toward the excellent.

The last question about goodwill is how to wield it. The solution is not to consider a posture of goodwill as an instrument of conflict. It is neither a cudgel, nor a shield – it loses its merciful power if it is used to attack our critics or defend ourselves from accountability. It works in a single direction: when we find something amiss, we should begin assuming the best and not rushing to judgment. When we err, we cannot reverse the order of things by ducking and covering ourselves with the demand that “you must show me goodwill.” At that point, it’s simply a tool of manipulation or self-gratification, not an act of grace. In truth, the move to require goodwill of others is a toxic moral protectionism. It’s akin to turning Christ’s “judge not lest ye be judged” into a defensive posture to prevent accountability.

If any school will be more successful when its posture is one of goodwill, a Classical school is especially well-suited to spare its members from “contempt prior to investigation” (as my mother describes it) and, in turn, provide greater occasion to grow, improve, and learn. Furthermore, those whose hearts have grown accustomed to proffering goodwill have laid the foundations for magnanimity.

Brandon Crowe is the Superintendent and Managing Director of Great Hearts Arizona. Mr. Crowe joined Great Hearts in 2007 as a Humane Letters teacher at Great Hearts Veritas Prep where he taught for five years and held several leadership positions. He later moved to Great Hearts Glendale Prep where he served as Headmaster for six years before moving into an executive leadership role with Great Hearts Arizona. Brandon is a member of the Arizona Charter School Association Board of Directors. He holds both his MA and BA in Religious Studies from Arizona State University. Brandon and his wife are native Phoenicians and live in the West Valley with their four boys.

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