Once a year, parents of young children can look forward to their kids coming home from school with turkeys drawn by hand and heartwarming lists of what they are grateful for, with loving parents and helpful teachers usually at the top of the list. This happens just before families pack up and travel to be together and give thanks for all the blessings of the year. The fact that we have a federal holiday dedicated to a day of gratitude is perhaps itself an argument that there is at least one virtue that Americans can agree is valuable enough to be taught, encouraged, and celebrated. However, just as one swallow does not make a summer day, one day of giving thanks is not sufficient to cultivate a virtue in children. Gratitude is a virtue that should not only be celebrated every year at Thanksgiving, but also taught and reinforced every day in our schools.
Gratitude is a personal virtue that is often understood as a part of justice. Justice is the virtue that governs our outward actions, making sure that they render to others what is owed to them. Gratitude, or giving thanks, is, in an important sense, about rendering what is owed, specifically to a benefactor or bestower of some gift or favor. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that, when someone gives a gift to another, a debt of gratitude arises that the recipient of the gift must pay back with gratitude, which should be offered in a spirit of honor and reverence towards the benefactor.
Gratitude is a virtue that strikes a mean between two extremes: feeling entitled to the gift on the one hand and feeling unworthy of a gift on the other. Gratitude is chiefly a matter of feeling thankful for the gift received. In fact, Aquinas, in his discussion of gratitude, quotes Seneca approvingly, who argues that whoever receives a gift or favor with gratitude in his heart has already begun to pay it back. Seneca further argues that we can show our gratitude by “the outpourings of our heart” and by showing our benefactors reverence and honor.
What we can offer in thanksgiving depends on our resources and our abilities, and it takes good judgment to see when proper gratitude is owed and how it can be offered. In our schools, we should encourage gratitude both as a matter of feeling and a form of action. Beginning at an early age, we can talk about how to identify the gifts we have been given and the value of giving thanks and modeling appropriate ways to do this with one another. We can encourage young children to be grateful to their parents for making them dinner, and to think of ways they can express their gratitude for a homecooked meal (e.g., helping to clean up the table, sweeping the floor, etc.). We can introduce them to stories where gratitude is a theme and give them concrete historical examples of acts of gratitude that they can understand and imitate.
As children get older, we can have them keep a gratitude journal, where they are prompted to reflect upon gifts they have received in their lives and ways they can repay the debt of gratitude they have incurred from others. We should model and encourage creativity about expressions of gratitude, keying them to the individual strengths and abilities of our students. And of course, we should encourage students to think of ways that they are indebted to one another at school and how to express gratitude to classmates, teachers, and friends. Writing letters of gratitude is one proven way to cultivate this disposition in students.
Gratitude is important because it helps us see all the ways that we depend on others in our lives. In this way, it is connected to humility—of having appropriate self-regard, one that is in tune with the fact that our successes are never entirely our own. Gratitude encourages us to reflect on the gifted aspects of our lives, and to cultivate the sense that we need to pay back debts of gratitude according to our means and abilities, and to be creative in how we think about how to express our gratitude, not just to other persons, but also to the institutions that have profoundly shaped our lives and livelihoods.
Empirical work on gratitude strongly suggests that its cultivation has many benefits, including greater health and psychological well-being. This wealth of research suggests that grateful people are generally happier, more satisfied with their lives, less materialistic, and less likely to suffer from burnout. There is also research suggesting that the cultivation of gratitude encourages the development of other virtues, including humility, patience, and wisdom. Studies on children suggest that gratitude enables them to be more socially integrated and happier in school, as well as see improvements in mood and the development of pro-social behavior.
While I am happy that America’s schoolchildren are taught to be grateful once a year, gratitude should be a part of our curriculum throughout the year because it is at the heart of flourishing students, schools, and communities.
