Being of Service
We paused as a community on Tuesday to mark Veterans Day. There are a number of alumni of this school who have devoted their careers to serving our country in branches across the military. Several have returned to BUA over the years to speak to our students and share their journeys. We are grateful for their service and the example they set.
Service takes many forms, but all forms center around a fundamental truth: service to others – our families, friends, community, a stranger, a cause – is where we find purpose in our lives. Decades of psychological research confirms a central thesis of Viktor Frankl’s seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning, based on his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during WWII: humans yearn for and are motivated by the feeling of contributing to something bigger than ourselves and being of service to others. That sense of purpose can be psychologically sustaining, not only in the horrific setting of Frankl’s work, but in more ordinary times as well.
As a school, we have a duty to give students the chance to experience the feeling of motivation and contentment that comes from being of use to others – that something they do matters and perhaps makes somebody else’s life better. Our mission promises that these young people will be challenged to “engage meaningfully in our community and beyond.” There are longstanding traditions of students volunteering in the school and around the Boston area. In the past two years, we have initiated a service-learning pilot where groups of BUA students travel to local middle and elementary schools to volunteer in their afterschool academic and enrichment programs. The interest among BUA students has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to expand the initiative in the coming years. We expect that it will create lifelong habits.