How To Choose Another Lame Theme For The Coming School Year

by Joshua Gibbs

Another lame theme for the school year.

Many Christian schools choose a theme for every new academic year and, often enough, these themes are abstract concepts like joy, peace, service, faith, humility. Secondary students are rarely excited about these themes—in fact, they can be downright cynical, and they have every right to be.  

Students aren’t cynical because they dislike joy or peace, but because “joy” and “peace” are ridiculous themes for a school year. It would be more accurate to say, rather, something like “peace” is never actually going to be the theme of the school year. When the headmaster says, “The theme of this school year is peace,” what he really means is, “I’m going to talk about peace today, during the convocation. Then I’ll mention “peace” again in an email your parents get next week. And then peace may be mentioned a couple times in finger-wagging lectures given at assemblies.” Because that’s really all the use anyone is likely to get out of “peace” as a them.  

You’re not going to have a peace-themed Fall Ice Breaker. You’re not going to have Peace Night at the first home basketball game. Peace isn’t going to be the theme of any feast days at school, or any meals, or any dress-up days. Students aren’t going to look back on the year later and say, “That was the year we did all of this peace-themed stuff. It was sort of wild.” Rather, “peace” is a forgettable theme because it can’t be tied to the senses—or tying “peace” to the senses requires more imagination and creativity than most administrators have. Students know all of this when the headmaster announces that “peace” is going to be theme on the first day of the school year, which is why they’re right to roll their eyes.   

What’s more, teachers who have worked at the school for more than five years will also roll their eyes when “peace” is announced as the theme for the year. Why? Because there will never be any peace snacks left in the lounge. “Peace” won’t get them an extra planning period or a bottle of wine before Christmas break. Instead, "peace" will be a reminder of just how lifelessly bureaucratic the administration is. A theme is chosen every year for no other reason than it has to be. It’s a thing to talk about, it’s leverage for sermons to be given later when students fight or bicker. In fact, no one really cares about “peace.” No one was excited when “peace” was settled on as next year’s theme in a calendar meeting six months ago. No one expected much of it. “Peace” was narrowly chosen over “joy” because there’s a teacher named Joy at the school who’s in the middle of a nasty divorce.  

If good fathers “do not exasperate their children,” then Christian administrators should be careful they not conduct themselves in a way that needlessly contributes to the cynicism of their students and staff.  

It would be better to not have a theme than to have a fake, flaccid one.  

But the choice is not merely between bad themes and no themes. You could choose a good theme. You could choose a productive theme. You could choose an actual theme, a theme that lends itself to feast days, meals, carnivals, dress-ups, posters, decor—in other words, a theme that appeals to the senses. A theme that prompts the creation of events that people look forward to. A theme that people can look back on and remember fondly—or just remember at all.  

What if “St. Nicholas” was the theme of the year? What if “Baroque art” was the theme of the year? Or how about “France? Or “1982”? Or “World War I”? Or “the 1950s”? Or “the music of the twentieth century? Or “the Renaissance”? Don’t those sound sort of fun? Don’t those sound like themes you could actually work with?  

Do you know how psyched your students would be to hear that “1982” was the theme of the year—and that a dozen different events were being planned around that theme? You could do a couple lectures on what happened in 1982, sure, but you could also host evening screenings of films from 1982, play music from 1982 played before basketball games, and have students dress like it was 1982 for spirit week. For fifty bucks, you could buy a cart of magazines from 1982 off eBay, let students rifle through them, and write reports on how different the world was back then. Imagine choosing a theme for the year that actually answered some open-ended questions you have about the arc of the year. 

Or, do all that with 1942, or 1842. Make it as old-fashioned as you like.  

Or, choose “peace” or “patience” or something lame that barely exists, and which the students mock every single time—okay, all four times—it comes up over the course of the year.   

But, alas, what I've said here is the kind of thing that everyone likes, but then nobody does. A few objections are stated at the calendar meeting and “peace” is chosen again.