The School is a place of Kindness. This can only really exist where humans are understood as essentially magnificent. “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” said Wordsworth. The heart of the teacher leaps up in beholding the beauty of human nature! The heart leaps up when the teacher sees the delighted smile of achievement in the student, and the growing grace and beauty, the stability and confidence, of the ever-learning, ever-striving human being! We love Humanity! 

There is a crucial difference between the nice and the kind. Niceness comprises, above all, a quality of friendliness. It includes patience, benevolence, humility and accommodation. When combined with intelligence, the nice person becomes an expert at making people feel good and comfortable. There is warmth here, and it is attractive to all. The nice person is generous and self-forgetful in meeting the needs of others. The nice teacher is exceptionally positive and encouraging. 

All these qualities and skills are truly admirable, and the next step ahead for many is to become nice, but they cause difficulties unless and until they are co-measured by other admirable or higher qualities. Nicely accommodating those that lack niceness, those that are selfish, greedy and cruel, those seeking to use the support of the nice person for selfish ends and to prop up weakness, becomes a major issue. Now the nice person can become cynical and mean, or they can transmute niceness into kindness. 

Kindness includes niceness, but surpasses it. In kindness, to the qualities of niceness are added: a) the authority of competence, and b) a humanistic standard that creates a willingness to say ‘no!’ as often and as forcibly as required. Niceness is warmth, but kindness is fire! 

Authority of Competence: Competence is the combined action of knowledge and skill-in-action. The competent coach looks and sees the gap between what is and what can be, and has the skill to lead the student in bridging that gap. In kindness the focus is on this impersonal and yet deeply human and humanizing process. Instead of trying to make the self-absorbed student feel personally good, the kind teacher encourages self-forgetfulness in the pursuit of mastery, and then, paradoxically, there is happiness and joy for the person, for they are achieving the stability of discipline, the serenity of confidence, and the strength of a self-made character.

Humanistic Standards: Where niceness is blindly nice, kindness discriminates. The greatness of some can be supported in a direct way, but the greatness in others is buried beneath a small or large heap of overlaying qualities, habits and behaviours, and the only and best support for them is a stern refusal to accept their weaknesses. “You’re better than this!” is the cry of kindness in the face of weakness. Now we are talking about the ‘ruthless kindness’ of the Master Teacher.

Of course, this kindness bears no relation to abuse in any of its forms. The greatest abuse a teacher can inflict is indifference, and this is utterly impossible in the midst of a fiery kindness, based in love of human learning and mastery. Equally, the teacher that is angry is not a teacher, no matter how ‘passionate’ he or she may claim to be. If the learning is impersonal, then how can the teaching be personal? Kindness includes the personal, but surpasses it and, in surpassing, changes it completely. In this case, indignation is possible, but this is not anger. Indignation is essentially based in an understanding of human worth. It is, again, ‘you’re better than this!”   This can arouse a sense of shame and renew the dignified spirit of striving, whereas anger is just ‘you’re not doing what I want!’ It is based on the ignorance, limitations, ambitions and insecurities of the angry person him or herself, and usually prompts angry rebellion, or, just as bad, resentful submission, in its wake.