Community Service at Hackley

Connections: March/April 2001 -- This section of “Connections,” entitled “Helping Hands,” celebrates community service at Hackley. The idea of community service is important to Hackley’s identity and to our educational ideals. Our founders chose iuncti iuvamus as our motto, “united we help one another,” and carved on the lintel of the school’s entrance, “Enter Here To Be And Find A Friend.” Those lines resonate at Hackley because our educational ideals are founded in a social conception of human identity. We create our individual identity through our relationships with others, and so developing the understanding of the moral dimensions in such relationships is part of our educational program. We want students to learn how important it is to help one another, and what it means to be a friend. We also want them to learn that we all need such help, as we all need friends.
Connections: March/April 2001 -- This section of “Connections,” entitled “Helping Hands,” celebrates community service at Hackley. The idea of community service is important to Hackley’s identity and to our educational ideals. Our founders chose iuncti iuvamus as our motto, “united we help one another,” and carved on the lintel of the school’s entrance, “Enter Here To Be And Find A Friend.” Those lines resonate at Hackley because our educational ideals are founded in a social conception of human identity. We create our individual identity through our relationships with others, and so developing the understanding of the moral dimensions in such relationships is part of our educational program. We want students to learn how important it is to help one another, and what it means to be a friend. We also want them to learn that we all need such help, as we all need friends.

As students mature, our responsibility as parents and as a school community is to help them discover ever broadening relationships with others. Education is a process of opening the mind and heart to the larger world. We begin with familial relationships, then broaden our social world to include friends and neighbors, then discover a sense of common identity rooted in the larger communities of religion, nationality, and culture. For many human beings, sadly, the sense of connection to some depends on the exclusion of others. At Hackley, our ideal is to help our students understand that our common human identity is much stronger than the apparent differences that can cause us to view people as “other.” We are all the “other,” as we all need help, and as we all need friends. Our community service programs provide an opportunity for our students to help others, and in so doing, discover that what we share is much more powerful than what divides us. The emotional experience of helping is a formative one, and nothing is more defining of our identities as human beings.

As “Helping Hands” demonstrates, we all owe thanks to Margaret Courtney and Terri Schwartz, who coordinate community service in the Lower School; to Angela Ashley-Holland, our Middle School Community Service Coordinator; to Tony Maisonet, our Upper School coordinator as Director of Community Affairs; and to the many parents who have helped create, supported and participated in Hackley’s many community service programs. Our commitment as a school and as a community to the education of character is warmly affirmed in these pages.

—Walter Johnson
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