Humility: Virtue of the Year

Each year, Head of School Tyler Casertano welcomes the entire Haverford School community back to campus with his fall letter. Read Mr. Casertano's perspective on Humility, the 2024–25 Virtue of the Year below. 

A version of this letter was sent via email on Sept. 6, 2024

Dear Fords,

I love Haverford. In a short amount of time, this community has come to feel like home, and after three years, I am quick to respond to anyone who asks that I love our School. But, perhaps more importantly, I can definitively say that I believe in Haverford.

I believe in our mission of preparing boys for life by developing men of character, intellect, and compassion who will transform our world. I believe in our identity as a boys school, and how that identity underpins a program and a culture that encourages boys to engage more broadly and deeply than they would in any other environment. I believe in that program and culture’s ability to transform our boys, allowing them to leave us not simply as better versions of the people who first arrived, but with a new conception of who they are and who they can be. I believe in our faculty and staff. I believe in our boys.

Those people, that program, and that culture at Haverford lead to extraordinarily successful outcomes, and it would be understandable to think that my belief in Haverford comes from those outcomes. Just last year, students won awards for everything from research on how AI can help maintain honeybee health to essays on diplomacy.

Our robotics team once again won a state championship and finished in the top 20 at the world championships. Nineteen Lower School students earned awards in the Gladwyne Library’s junior author contest. Sixteen Form VI students earned recognition from the National Merit Society.

Our Upper School fall play and spring musical were nominated for 11 awards, and both of our Middle School singing groups, the Centennial Singers and the Haverford Boys Choir, won awards for their performances, including an award for “outstanding character."

Athletically, in addition to keeping the Sweater, our teams won Inter-Ac championships in soccer, water polo, golf, swimming, tennis, and lacrosse, and won national championships in both crew and Middle School squash. Haverford also won the Heyward Cup, which measures competitiveness across all sports in our league, for a record 21st time.

That set of achievements is astonishing, and is something of which I am deeply proud.

While those accomplishments happen in different spaces, though, they are all part of a larger process of education at Haverford, a process that begins with relationships. Those relationships inspire our boys. They push them to see parts of themselves that they didn’t see before. They help them work through adversity. They give them a sense of community and joy.

Through those relationships, our boys are able to engage in the classroom, on the stage, in the studios, and on the fields in ways that they didn’t previously know they could. That is how they become their best selves and accomplish all those remarkable successes. It’s not simply because they themselves are remarkable, but because they allow themselves to learn from one another and to grow together.

At the center of that process is humility. Humility is a recognition of the strengths both in ourselves and in others. It is a recognition of our responsibility as members of this community to share our strengths with others to support them, and in turn to allow others to share their strengths to support us. It is a willingness to build a relationship with someone we don’t know. A willingness to allow that person to help us. A willingness to do something we are not fully confident in doing, and a willingness to encourage others to do the same. I see that willingness everyday in every corner of Haverford, and that willingness drives my belief in who we are and who we can be.

Sometimes, humility is seen as the opposite of confidence. At Haverford, we see confidence as a virtue, and it is not a coincidence that confidence and humility are side-by-side on the Walk of Virtues. We believe that true confidence comes not from an innate conviction that we can simply do something, but from a process of learning, growth, and accomplishment that begins with humility. It is a process that entails listening, collaboration, reflection, determination, and persistence, and that ultimately provides our boys with the confidence that they can overcome adversity to do difficult and remarkable things.

Humility is, however, the opposite of arrogance, a sense that one is superior to others. That attitude of arrogance, of superiority, prevents us from that very process of relationships, engagement, and transformation that leads to remarkable outcomes. It stops us from being open to the reality that a person who we don’t know or that we are not friends with is capable of teaching us something, and might even become that close friend who pushes us to be our best. It stops us from engaging in new experiences that could expand our awareness and even become newfound passions. It stops us from embracing our responsibility to share our talents with others to care for and support them. It stops us from developing true confidence.

If we stay grounded in humility, we will take full ownership of our responsibility to each other and to our School. We will see one another not as competitors for superiority, but as peers with a shared responsibility to each other and to this community. And when an individual or a group achieves success, regardless of whether it happens in the classroom, on the stage, or on the fields, we will see those successes not as their achievements, but as our achievements, for we will know that we all played a role in that success.

And so, our virtue of the year is humility. When we devote ourselves to that virtue, we will reach new heights individually and collectively, and we will develop the true confidence to meet the opportunities and the challenges that this year may bring. Not a hollow, fake confidence, but an earned confidence that, just like on the Walk of Virtues, stands side-by-side with humility. A confidence that comes from knowing that we have an entire community behind us, helping us to become our very best selves.

Here’s to a fantastic 2024–25 school year, filled with the humility that drives our relationships, engagement, and transformation.

—Tyler Casertano