Citadel Life: The Heart Turned Outward

When we launched Citadel Life last year, I wrote that we hoped this house system would foster a stronger sense of community, encourage character development, and provide a platform for the kind of camaraderie and competition that has long animated the great schools of Europe. What I did not fully anticipate was how quickly our students would seize the project for themselves, and how generously they would direct that energy outward. The service work that has unfolded across all four citadels this year, our inaugural year, has been one of the most heartening developments of my time as Headmaster, and I want to share it with you in some detail.

 

Service is a deliberate and load-bearing piece of Citadel Life. We did not append it to the program as an afterthought or a box to check. The classical tradition has always understood that virtue is acquired through practice. Aristotle observed that we become just by doing just acts, courageous by doing courageous ones. The young person who has been told to be generous has learned a lesson. The young person who has organized a diaper drive, knocked on classroom doors, hauled boxes, written thank-you notes, and seen fifteen families served because of her work has been formed. There is a chasm of difference between the two, and our citadels are built to close it.

 

Service also pulls our upper school students out of themselves at exactly the age when self-absorption is the great temptation. Adolescence seems engineered to be a hall of mirrors, every screen a surface that reflects the self back to the self. A liberal education for free people, the kind we are committed to giving our students, must do more than fill the mind. It must turn the heart outward.

 

When a Carkie collects books for children who have none, when a Lettie sits and paints the fingernails of an elderly woman who has forgotten her own name, when a York student walks the Kingfisher Trail picking up the trash that winter has left behind, that student is being formed into someone who sees the world as a place to which he owes something. That is the disposition of a citizen. It is also, in the older sense of the word, the disposition of any person of good will.

 

Citadel Carcassonne extended our school’s commitment to childhood literacy beyond our own campus this year. Through the first annual Carkies Care Book Drive, organized in partnership with the Queen City Book Bank, the Carkies collected new and gently used novels, picture books, works of literature, and non-fiction texts for financially disadvantaged children from infancy through Grade 12. Collection bins appeared in every homeroom at the Siebenthaler Campus and in the fifth and sixth grades at Summit Park, and the totals are still climbing. Our gratitude goes to Sophie Arengo, eighth grader and Master of Service for Citadel Carcassonne, who organized this initiative alongside her Service Committee and led it with the seriousness it deserved.

 

Citadel Siena has set itself the practical and immediately useful task of building a ga-ga pit on the lower school playground at the Siebenthaler Campus. The Senesis are raising the funds, sourcing the materials, and constructing the pit themselves. Younger students at Siebenthaler will, for years to come, play in a space built by older students they may never meet by name but whose work will remain. There is something quietly classical about this. A citadel acts; the city benefits; the act outlasts the actors. To the Stars Through Wisdom, the Sienese motto reads, and wisdom in this case has taken the very tangible form of measurements, lumber, and labor.

 

Citadel York has had perhaps the busiest year of all. In the fall, the then-Minister of Civil Service, Vincent Peck, organized a baby-goods drive for Pregnancy Center Plus. By the time the drive closed in November, York students had contributed approximately $1,500 worth of goods through an Amazon registry and another $200 in diapers gathered from in-class collection bins.

 

Pregnancy Center Plus reports that fifteen families received goods from this effort. Vincent’s leadership was so consistent and so capable that his provost created a new position over all aspects of Citadel Life and asked him to be the first to hold it. He has served as Prime Minister with distinction ever since. His successor as Minister of Civil Service, Amy Slonkosky, organized a December candy drive in the York homerooms that yielded fifteen hundred pieces of candy for a local charity that provides holiday treats to families who would otherwise go without.

 

Together with Eli Matthews, the Minister of Learning, Vincent and Amy also organized peer tutoring in mathematics, grammar, and Latin for fifth and sixth graders. Five students attend regularly and a handful of others have come once or twice. Nine tutors have given thirty hours and forty-five minutes of their afternoons this semester to the work of explaining a participial phrase or a fraction to someone younger.

 

Jack Martin has logged the most hours thus far. To tutor a younger student well requires patience, articulate speech, and the recognition that one knows something worth passing on. These are the habits of a teacher, and our York students are practicing them. Finally, Amy organized an out-of-school project on April 11, when eight York students and their parents walked the Kingfisher Trail at Winton Woods and collected the trash that the creek and the trailside had accumulated over the winter. Truth Conquers All, the Yorkies say, and truthful work, in this case, was simply showing up with a bag and a willingness to bend down.

 

Citadel Valletta took on two service projects this year, and both deserve a hearing. In November, 26 Letties traveled to Traditions Assisted Living in Deerfield to spend an afternoon with the elderly residents there, many of whom suffer from memory disorders. The students played games, joined in light exercises, and offered manicures and nail painting to anyone who wanted them. The visit was an act of presence, the rarest gift the young can give the old. In April, Citadel Valletta organized a charity drive for babies in need, led by Alaina Mandas, Eliana Kwon, Sophia Enders, and Anna Schmitt. They collected diapers, clothes, books, toys, and other necessities of infant care, all of which will be donated to A Caring Place, a pregnancy care center that provides items and assistance at no cost to families in difficulty. Wisdom and Virtue, the Valletta motto, has been put to good use.

 

When I look across these four projects, what strikes me most is the variety. One citadel is building a ga-ga pit. Another is collecting books. A third is sitting with the elderly and gathering goods for new mothers. A fourth is tutoring younger students, raising money for pregnant women, and sweeping up after the winter.

 

There has been no central directive from the Headmaster’s office prescribing what each citadel must do. Each has discerned its own way of serving, and each has thrown itself into that service with the energy of students who feel that the work is genuinely theirs. This is the formation we hoped Citadel Life would produce.

 

A young person who has been formed in this way will carry these habits into college, into work, into marriage and family, into citizenship. He will know how to organize, how to lead, how to follow, and above all how to give without expecting a return. That is what Cincinnati Classical Academy is in the business of doing. Citadel Life, in this its first year, has confirmed that we are doing it well.

 

My thanks to the provosts who have shepherded these efforts, to the student officers who have led them, and to you, the parents, who have driven your children to drop-offs, signed permission slips, and trusted us with the formation of your sons and daughters.

Torches Up!