From Dr. Thurow:
Amidst the business of orienting faculty and students this week (herding deviously intelligent cats!) I will simply share what I have always thought to be a very thoughtful quote with you today. High school is when children become young adults. An important part of the work of the faculty I am meeting with this week is to be of some assistance to you in shepherding these young souls through this process. Childishness gives way to maturity, as it should. But let us not forget that proper childishness (being child-like) is a sacred and beautiful thing. Christ came to the world first as a child. It is right for children at the right stage and to the right degree to desire to leave childhood behind, certainly. It is, however, wrong for us, as adults, to ever despise or fear it:
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
-(C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”)
August 7, 2025