My father was a B-24 bomber pilot during World War ll. After 87 missions, he was alive, brave, talented, funny and wickedly intolerant of anyone inauthentic. He despised the braggart, boasting of unearned privilege. He had been in positions where honor and honesty matter — were key to life. He distrusted leaders who thought different rules applied to them, serving themselves at the expense of others. My father was a patriot and uniquely idealistic, given the horror of war. He loved a quote by the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, “We are soldiers reporting to our commanding officer on a mortal mission — to live life honorably.” And he tucked this notion away, knowing that amidst life’s ups and downs, this simple mantra could tether his life to decency and sanity.

What does a mortal mission to live life honorably look like to my students?

Times are far different than when my father went off to war in 1942, yet my students argue that we still face issues that have always lived at the root of humanistic and philosophical reflection: Who are we? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live with honor? Character is still at the heart of being great and a requisite to living honorably. For my students, the only route to being exceptional is to do self-reflective, moral work, aligning our values and actions into an identity that honors the profound gift of being human. They would have liked my father.

In conversations about leadership, honor and character, Reynis Vasquez, a student, wrote:

“Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well. The efforts to overcome our differences must be rooted in self-transcendence. We must reach out beyond ourselves, viewing ourselves as a cohesive ecosystem: a community that we must respect and revere. Yevtushenko states we must not ‘dehumanize’ others by turning them into objects of hatred. Often when we are attacked or feel vulnerable, our first instinct is to prepare to fight back. We may even try to justify the counter-attack by rousing up a deep hatred for the initial offender. However this merely adds more fuel to the fire of terror, and ‘instead of burning down terror we burn down our souls with our white-hot hatred, and become indistinguishable from those we fight against.’ In whatever battle we choose to fight, we must maintain our humanity because it is what can ultimately bring us all together.”

Morgan Karow wrote:

“Principles may sound abstract, but the consequences of moral principles are quite concrete. The consequences when leaders lack principles are perilous to our democracy, our sense of decency, our children, our grandchildren … our future. Notions of living an honorable life rest on the notions of creating a more just world and the call to conscience-driven action that rests intimately on a foundation of being self-pure. In essence, it is a subtle yet profound state of innocence where we are not complicit in that which we oppose.”

 Jane Taylor wrote:

“What makes our lives worth living is the activities we engage in that are in accord with our values, whatever happens in the world. If we live in this way, even if our cause isn’t successful, we will have lived a life that is worthwhile because it will be a life that is authentically our own. I cannot imagine what more we could ask than to live a life that is driven by our values, that is directed toward a project of world-historical importance, to heal both ourselves and the Earth.”

When I became a teenager and could appreciate my father’s sensibilities and the experiences that shaped him, I happened to meet and be schooled by Wells Kerr, a revered Colorado Rocky Mountain School English teacher and Shakespearen scholar. Wells once told me that if I wanted to know the human character intimately, read Shakespeare. Wells’ personal integrity and warmth caused him to look into our adolescent eyes and see courageous souls struggling honorably for decency and dignity. Yet he knew well of America’s old divisions, which find sanctuary in sanctimonious attempts to dodge the inclusive we in “We the People.” He would recognize our current government’s servitude to the wealthy while neglecting the rest of us with a flare on par with Shakespeare’s pirate in “Measure for Measure,” which Wells could extemporaneously quote:

LUCIO
Thou conclud’st like the sanctimonious pirate
 that went to sea with the 10 commandments but
scraped one out of the table.

SECOND GENTLEMAN 
“Thou shalt not steal?”

LUCIO 
Ay, that he razed.

So, when the cynicism of our political leaders and the silence of the majority has me scared and worried about the soul of our nation, my students’ eloquent clarity assures me all is not lost. Like my father and Wells Kerr, they know the value of character in difficult times. They know pirates when they see them. And most importantly, they know that there is no way to fail when one raises their voice for the dignity of another.

As student Issac Gerber wrote:

“It does not take some higher hope, some clouded vision, some plea for anything spiritual, or some claim for moral convictions to recognize the issues today are issues of character — not perceptions of justice … We do not have to look beyond the human to see the issues in the human. We just have to look him square in the eyes.”