Category: Remembrance

Their Fate Will Be Our Fate Too

9/11/2023

The block four stairs and I are not strangers. I monitor safe passage, preventing foolishness including jumping, running, scuffling, bickering and attempts at back-facing ascent and descent. Therefore, I was glad when Paul Muldoon’s poem about bannisters plonked itself out of the ether into my face.

Our ornamental gates and railings that were melted down
for rifle barrels have gained some sort of posthumous renown
by unambiguously drawing a line in the sand.
The gates and railings are finally taking a firm stand
and even more emphatically bringing things to a close.
The exit wound is their approximation of a rose
or a geranium under gauze on the windowsill.
Gangrene. The green and gold of the first full-blown daffodil.
Also rendered, so it would even more tellingly rend,
was lead stripped from the gutters and flashing. For lead will bend
along a spine as it did along a walnut ridge post.
What was once an outer sanctum is now the innermost.
Shouldered as rifle stocks, after a mere three weeks of drill,
the bannisters are gradually taking another hill.

We’ve been thinking about war at Tallis, ten years after my first blog. It’s Remembrance, of course, so we’re preparing for that. This year we planned to focus on the contribution of the Windrush generation and public servants. Discussing it in the staff briefing, one said ‘This will be Carolyn’s last’ as if I were being called to higher service forthwith. I’m only retiring. I trust I’ll see another Remembrance.

Our young people are rightly worried about Israel and Gaza, for the full range of reasons. This conflict is very hard to educate about. Sometimes I wonder if there are things in the world that are best left to adult life – but that’s a hard message to hear when you’re seventeen or eighteen and rightly determined to change the world for the better. Our discussions haven’t been much helped by a letter to schools from the SoS and two government ministers which tells me what I can’t do on this particular global issue. In the absence of better actions, I’ve waved it at a lot of people.

At the same time, I’ve been talking to new staff about what brought them to our door and I’m delighted by their stories. Most of them are fuelled with a desire to transform, built from their own experience or sheer determination. Many are strikingly dressed. All of them seem to love their tutor groups, which can be tricky when you take over a little family from someone much loved who’s left: as one said ‘they’ve just about warmed to me’. I doff my cap: I once took over a year 11 who didn’t speak to me until Christmas. We had a lot of frosty sessions together until they stopped hating me for not being Mr Harrison.

I’m talking to new teachers on the PTI Saturday courses and the good graduates of the Chartered College this weekend. I’m thinking about vision and motivations, why they wanted to be teachers, and what keeps them doing a frankly quite tricky job. I’m keen to be part of the solution that keeps good people in the classroom for the long term, not part of the problem that makes them leave. So I’m thinking about the teacher’s place in society: public intellectual, role model, advocate for the young. Not everyone can live up to that every day but as long as most of us do most of it all the time then our hopelessly fragmented system will survive this bumpy patch and the children will be served well.

Which we do: from my forty-year standpoint, children are better taught and better looked after than they’ve ever been. Their betrayal, however, is two-fold: the poverty that blights so many lives, and the shockingly poor funding of schools which blights the choices of all but the most compliant and quick-to-learn.

It was war and teachers combined therefore which led me to a list of unbelievably brave teachers in the Second World War. These are people who risked everything to shelter and hide children and to keep them from the concentration camps. I’d not met them before and I think their names are worth recording:

Elizabeth Abegg of Germany
Amato Billour of Italy
Benjamin Blankenstein and Joop Westerwiel of the Netherlands
Vladimir Chernovol of Ukraine
Andree Gulen of Belgium
Jelena Glavaski of Serbia
Nuro Hoxha of Albania
Aleksander Kramarovsky of Russia
Gertruda Stanislawa Marciniak of Poland
Joseph Migneret of France
Gerda Valentina of Denmark

It was Sister Gertruda who said ‘once a child has come to me, their fate will be my fate too’. Words that any nation would be wise to heed.

CR
9.11.23

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I like, I wish, I wonder

14/11/2021

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I note that the late Princess of Wales in the latest film imagines eating pearls at a tedious royal Christmas. I like a pearl myself, though not for supper, and am assured by fashion pages to which I am obviously a slave that you can wear them with anything. This includes PE kit, whereupon earrings and necklace were modelled by a young person going into year 7 assembly on Monday. Lest uniform or H&S geeks are panicking, PE kit is worn all day on post-pandemic PE days, and doubtless the pearls would be cast orf before any kind of throttling danger.

Such Year 7 eccentricities prosper in a happy school. I intervened with a pair blissfully unconcerned about the pile-up of traffic on the bridge behind their experiment into picking up things while pretending they had no hands, as they explained as I towed them into a layby. Another keeps me daily informed on the progress of her new brace.
Year 8 are developing the anxieties of adolescence. I scrutinised a science corridor this morning and advanced upon two pleasant citizens outside a lab. Behaviour walkabout gives you familiarity with those few more likely to be without than within and these were strangers to truculence. ‘We can’t go in because of the lungs on my desk’ was the beguiling reason. And so it was: offal being inflated with a bicycle pump by a technician while the teacher (‘I’m not at my best with this sort of stuff’) kept a respectful distance. The transfixed class bickered mildly about vegetarianism while scrutinising the biology.

I’ve spent a lot of weekends recently separated from the Roberts sofa, at conferences and meetings. It was at one such that a colleague used a new-to-me feedback mantra of ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’. Struth. I like Year 7, I wish they wouldn’t cause an embouteillage, I wonder why some people will happily poke at a pair of lungs while others turn green? She also talked about ‘lethal mutations’ of previously good ideas, an obvious but helpful description, like when a concern for teachers’ workload leads to a rigid, strangulating, pre-packaged lesson delivery.

There is a part of the forest specialising in lethal mutations. Current scuffling under the foliage from Sanctuary Buildings appears to be muffled mutterings about academisation, of interest to those 21% of us secondary schools still blessedly council-run. SoS Zahawi hasn’t really said anything and Herrington the Schools Commissioner says there isn’t a master plan yet. But soft! In a dull-sounding consultation entitled ‘Reforming how local authorities’ school improvement functions are funded’, launched inevitably during half-term, we find:

the government’s longer-term ambition for all schools to become academies within a strong MAT

– an end point which a number of councils are already closing in on, where councils would no longer maintain schools.

The report uses the brain-scrambling terminology of de-delegation which, despite tussling for decades, I have to work out every time. De-delegation is when a Local Authority doesn’t pass part of the schools’ grant into schools’ delegated funding but keeps part of it for a particular purpose. I was once trapped in a consultation about de-de-delegation for which ‘delegation’ didn’t seem to be an acceptable contraction. As Ted Lasso says, I’m still looking forward to having it explained to me. I choose not to panic.

Next door the World Peace Game in is full flow with citizens of the Republic of Tallis alongside those from the hill tribes of Eltham and Parliament. They’ve just had the term ‘sitrep’ explained to them and are dealing with submarine menaces, I think. They understand that negotiation takes forever but is the only guarantee of lasting success. Some of the visitors are very inquisitive about what else is happening here and pass slowly by my door or glue their noses to the window.

They’d have had a treat yesterday for Remembrance, with everyone quiet on the yard under the spell of a magnificent trumpeter from the band of the Grenadier Guards. Someone wrote to me saying that we disrespect the remembering of the war dead by looking at the racism and colonialism inherent in our conflict history and I am sorry if it looks like that. We don’t, but our young people have to learn from the past so they can make the future better.

I like, I wish, I wonder. I like schools and their children. I wish we knew what we wanted from a national education system. I wonder why ideas mutate lethally and everyone shouts madly at each other.

I hear through the door that global warming hasn’t been solved by the 12-year olds. It’s enough to make anyone eat their pearls.

CR
12.11.21

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Lest we forget ourselves

7/11/2020

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I’ve been guilty of appalling double standards this very day. I took a turn around the estate at break and had five very interesting encounters.

The first was with a colleague. We’ve been considering de-gendering some staff loos to reduce travel time. This colleague had expressed concern and we had an unsurprisingly frank exchange on Lavatory Habits I Have Known.
The second was with my old friend the political correspondent who is now, can you believe it, in year 13. We stood together to discuss the US presidency when she was a mere stripling in year 9 and were happy to pick it up again. We speculated on the Electoral Colleges – as if either of us knew what we were talking about – and the international coarsening of public discourse. We were foxed by the simultaneous demands of agitated groups to count votes and stop counting votes and agreed that a hallmark of democracy was probably counting all the votes.
I then pottered over to the year 7 zone where some smaller youth were egregiously not learning from previous mistakes. While Head of Year was dealing with it perfectly accurately, it attracted the attention of me and a Deputy Head. Outrage and the summoning of parents were mooted.

Proceeding in an easterly direction to block 5, my ear was assaulted by a shrill and regular dinging sound. I raised an eyebrow at the culprit who’d found a nice magnet and was trying it on the sturdy metal pillars of the canteen verandah. All of them. We agreed that the magnet should be returning to its siblings in block 2 while he, it transpired, was needed elsewhere.

Then I smiled at two colleagues on toilet duty (student loos, you understand, we don’t monitor the staff ones) as I headed through the door. We noted that masks require more eyebrow effort when greeting with a smile. They managed it elegantly and with some subtlety, I look like a goggling lunatic.

Then I found myself alone on a deserted staircase with metal handrails and a confiscated magnet that itched in the palm. I may have done some dinging of my own and I may have experimented with picking up my keys with it when I should have been concentrating on a budgetary matter. It may still be on my desk in a paperclip sculpture of my own devising.

Later still I taught my year 13s and made them chuckle more than once and saw a child pelting across the grass, arms wide as if practising for flight in the same was as my tiny granddaughter does. (Though she may be being a duck, toddlers keep their own counsel on these matters.) It was a good day.

Earlier I’d recorded a Remembrance assembly piece. I looked at images and words, what we see and hear when we look at or listen to Remembrance. Setting the record straight on who fought in the wars of history is easier now: the archive is unfolding its treasures and all of our young people can recognise themselves in the house of remembrance. The words are more difficult: I talked a bit about Binyon’s 1914 For the Fallen, the Kohima Epitaph of 1944 – and Kipling’s 1897 Recessional because all of them are used, all over the place.

You go too far! you cry. Invictus was bad enough but Recessional? Ghastly Empire Stuff. Yes. It is, but as long as the Remembrance people produce flags, car stickers, mugs, hats and so on with ‘Lest We Forget’ on then I’ll carry on trying to explain precisely what it means.

Kipling wrote Recessional in 1887 for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s a eight-line five-verser with the refrain ‘Lest we forget – lest we forget’. That echoes a bit of Deuteronomy which, in the old version reads, ‘then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.’ So the forgetting which we should be lesting not is not the dead, but the hand of God. Here endeth.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that this may not be exactly where the thoughts of youth may tend on Wednesday. Maybe so, but the sentiment of lest we forget is about the fragile foothold each generation has in history. That empire, those wars were huge, terrible, brutal and costly – but they passed away. No one is alive who read Kipling’s poem in the Spectator in 1897, no-one who fought in the Great War, barely anyone who survived Kohima. Did any of it matter?

We are rightly obsessed with our own terrible times – the virus, furloughs, lockdowns and the US election. Our grasp on the present feels so weak that we might cling to alleged certainties of the past. But as Kipling said - "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre." What will remain of us? Looking into the future, what have we got?

No previous generation has ever tried educating so many young people for so long. We’d better hope that it will help them to understand the world and change it for the better. It will be through them that our best hopes survive. Love, I hope, and goodness. Fairness, honesty, respect, optimism and kindness. Inquisitiveness, discipline, collaboration, persistence, and imagination. No matter what else we lose in the current battles, surely these must never pass away? Lest we forget.

CR
6.11.20

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Children and war

17/11/2018

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Imagine the scene. Over 2000 people on the concourse, fluttering strings of red messages, life-size photographs of soldiers, nurses, civilians, children of the wars, representatives of five faiths and a very tall bugler in full dress uniform, including bearskin. Last post sounds, two minutes silence, then Reveille. The bugler snaps smartly to attention and salutes. A good number of children are so startled by this that they salute back, before we have our usual Tallis claps and disperse for break.

We planned this year’s Remembrance for a while to make sure that the 100th anniversary of the armistice wasn’t missed. We worked with filmmakers internally and externally and people shared family stories. We made poppies and even had a special lunch menu – heavy on the pie and root vegetables, with a rather toothsome fruit cake. And we goggled at each other in properly inquisitive manner. One colleague who joined us from the army had beret and medals and a girl rushed up to me. ‘I’ve just seen Sir, he’s wearing all his badges.’ A chum put her right. ‘Not badges, medals. He didn’t get them for being brave at the dentist’.

Yet the lasting memory for me took place out of sight of the crowds, out of earshot of the bugle. We gathered guests from mosque, church, gurdwara and synagogue in my room to welcome them before 11, sharing perspectives on Remembrance and seeing Muslim and Jew embrace, heartfelt, like brothers.

So much time in school is spent trying to teach young people that love, friendship, kindness, cooperation, tolerance and peace is better than hate, suspicion, cruelty, threats, violence and war. The adult world sets a terrible example to adolescents who are quite capable of making entirely idiotic choices in social affairs. The great liberation educator Paulo Freire described this very aptly as them being ‘caught up in the drama of their own existence’. Teenagers prefer to fan flames of outrage, rather than damp them. They enjoy gossip and rumour and they’re very poor at seeing the longer game. They’re prone to hyperbole, and they lack the experience to know that some things just don’t matter.

Some of these irritating characteristics are also strengths. Deep interest in other people, a strong sense of justice, faithfulness to friends and living in the moment are characteristics worth having. In their turn they’re better than indifference, isolation and living in the past. At its best, Remembrance focuses on the good, on the resilience of the human spirit.

But the personal wars our young people inhabit are terrifying when they go wrong. When intense self-regard or sensitivity to pressure turns inward to self-harm, when justice seems to demand violence, when sociability becomes persecution. Adults should live to protect young people, from those who’d do them harm and from themselves while the turbulence of adolescence rages.

This is why I’m so annoyed almost everything in social policy at the moment – if that term isn’t itself an echo from better days. When Universal Credit doesn’t work, its children who go hungry. When schools can’t afford support staff its children whose needs are unheard. When there aren’t any teachers its children whose hopes and dreams are scuppered. When there aren’t enough police its children, manipulated by adults fuelled by delusions of status, who kill one another.

The great Macneice poem I’ve quoted before (Prayer before Birth) has a verse that reads:

I am not yet born, forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

Our children need us, society, the state, to look after them because they are children and can’t look after themselves. They need us to protect them and help them to grow. Just because we’re not sending them in their hundreds of thousands to die on the green fields of France doesn’t mean that we’re not sacrificing them. We need a safer, kinder world for them, now.

CR
15.11.18

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Love in the Crowd

22/11/2015

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The Tallis wreath at the Menin Gate, November 2015.

Poppies, ironically, are not in season in November so year 8 and 9s’ appearance at the Menin Gate on November 10th was accompanied by a wreath of red gerberas. Our wreath-layers acquitted themselves well and a short film was sent so we could see it back on the mothership on November 11th. We marked the moment respectfully, heard the bugle, and went about our break time business of hugging and sausage sandwiches. That was Wednesday. The following Monday we were at it again, silent in the yard, wondering quite what to think.

I’d arranged to do year 11 assembly on Monday morning in any case. I showed the symbols of the Republique and we talked about Marianne’s tears on some sites. The abuse of power comes as no surprise, I said.

Those who have violence at their fingertips have a tendency to use it: the armed against the unarmed, the strong against the weak. They listened carefully and thought hard. We remembered 7/7 – and the bombing campaigns of the 70s. We are not afraid.

Regular readers know that my year 7 groups act as a touchstone for the zeitgeist. We pondered Paley’s metaphor of the watchmaker and started to wonder in a more systematic way than in September if there was a God. Putting that on hold, we returned to our regular current affairs slot. I told them that I didn’t think Instagram was a reliable news source (World War 3 starting next Tuesday, targeting schools – God, I hope I’m right) and we thought a bit about the best response to terrorism. I don’t usually allow football as a news story, but the Wembley match was ripe for discussion. As was the breaking news from Paris: why do terrorists use bits from the Qur’an? It’s really embarrassing, said one. Why indeed?

These little ones are getting their feet under the table now. They’re relaxing and thinking, starting to see the seven-year path to adulthood unrolling in the wide corridors and high level walkways of this place. Every so often you get a glimpse of the adult within: a doer, a joker, a worrier. Some will take on the world, some may wish to abdicate responsibility for others. Some who’ll come to love money above all things and some who’ll be fired with righteous fury to change the world for the better. Their faces illuminate the future. Seeing a hall full of them is a wonderful thing.

Lots of adults who drop by under different guises also have children here in school. Sometimes the fates combine to give them a glimpse of the beloved child in a corridor or over my Juliet balcony (oh yes). There’s not a parent in the world who doesn’t grin from ear to ear when the young one flits by, so assured, so capable. Teachers do a lot of that. We seek out the faces in the crowd of the child we want to see, we can scan a thousand faces to find the one who needs a particular word, a helping hand, a reminder or reprimand, a nibble round the edges until the work is done.

I’m always worried that I won’t see the face I’m looking for in a crowd. That there’ll be someone close by who needs something I can offer and I’ll miss it through doziness or preoccupation. I have no idea how you go about blowing up a crowd. Looking at ours on Wednesday and Monday, how could you lay waste to people? I’m pretty sure that some people just love violence for its own sake and then have to find a way to justify it. Their arguments are vapid and cynical, looking for easy answers in a world of compromise. It’s not new, but it is newly awful.

I often quote the great Rob Coe of Durham University, a neighbour of mine in former days. After years of world-leading research, he’ll only say that children learn when they have to think really hard. The most important thing we can do in our schools is to teach them to think really hard so that when the inexplicable happens they have the wherewithal to reflect sensibly and find ways to resist and survive. To identify a good argument and reject a rubbish one. To care and serve, no matter how annoying, rather than seethe and hate. That’s why our happy communities, noisy with discussion and lit up by faces we love in the crowd might help to save the world. There’s a time for talking and a time for silence, but I don’t want to blow that whistle again for another year.

CR
18.11.15

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Where do you go to my lovely?

15/2/2015

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Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, A Child's Face, 1944, Theresienstadt (Terezin)

Year 11 English last week considered loss and beauty in the poetry of the Great War. Diverted from a film still of la Redmayne (‘he really is beautiful, sir’) and recommending further reading (‘there’s a lovely sonnet of Milton’s’) we tussled over the number of horsepersons of the apocalypse. One amongst us had forgotten Death who, as you recall, brings hell in its wake. GCSE approaches so I investigated how close we are to peak poem. ‘I’m working for an A*’ said one no less beautiful specimen, skilfully tangling himself in a roller blind and nearly falling out of the window.

War troubles me for all the usual reasons, though I don’t think I’m a pacifist. Holocaust Memorial Day in January troubled me more after I went to Auschwitz in 2006: not so much the camp as the bureaucracy. I think to myself – if you were a headteacher in such times, when would you know something was amiss? When would you worry? When would you act? Would you worry about having to submit the names of children of a particular group? How would you feel about the yellow stars? About an edict to segregate classrooms? If the attendance of particular children became something you weren’t accountable for? If they disappeared? If you ran a really successful school, followed all instructions properly and kept the system stable for the others? When is a headteacher culpable? When the men in uniforms appear in a truck for the children you’ve been told to line up in the yard, doing it as they’ve been taught and telling jokes to keep each other cheerful? If not then, when?

So much of what we believe now about human rights is rooted in the soil of Auschwitz. Children’s rights pre-date that. The plight of small blockaded children after the First War compelled Eglantine Jebb to start Save the Children, but nothing saved them from Hitler. French primary schools commemorate exactly this. Since 1997 plaques have appeared in Paris and beyond explaining exactly what happened. From this school, this arondissement, such-and-such number of pupils were deported as a result of Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government. Those headteachers of the little ecoles maternelle and splendid lycees: what did they think they were doing? Did they believe the rhetoric? Were they just following orders? Were they protecting their own income and fragile safety under the jackboot of tyranny? What would you do?

Children are easy to miss. Many of them are small and all of them are powerless. They are either weak and easy to neglect or adolescently strong and easy to corrupt. They like certainty and are poor judges of what is good for them. They get hungry and tired quickly. They can’t vote and don’t pay taxes. They are easy to kill.

Schools keep children alive because schools are where this society looks after its young. School attendance is a human good. If we see them every day we know they are fit and well while we try to push a bit of Spanish or algebra into them. School is about regularity, routine, walls of safety to batter against until you can look after yourself. Chasing persistent non-attenders is depressingly hard and helping children escape from that chaos unbelievably difficult. It can’t all be done by a workforce occupied in the parts of a volcano or the uses of copper sulphate. An old head once described the perfect Education Welfare Officer as having the personality of a Sergeant-Major and the speed of Linford Christie (it was a while ago), but they are disappearing with the fading of public services. How does a school, or a council, choose between keeping children warm or paying the people who’ll check that they’re still alive?

Free schooling up to adulthood is a great achievement of civilisation and education makes people live longer. We have a duty in school to make sure that adults don’t mess up children’s lives by withholding or denigrating education. Here’s to the schools that know where all their children are, every day, and here’s to the workforce who make that possible. Here’s to the attendance officers, social workers, youth workers and police officers who support us and the parents who persevere. Here’s to the whining school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school and here’s to the teachers who make sure he knows that Shakespeare said it.

It takes a village to raise a child and some of our villagers have council identity tags and unreasonable workloads. We are partners in protecting ourselves from error and our children from harm. Who’s campaigning on that manifesto?

CR 12.2.15

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Navigating Events

16/11/2014

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Joseph Mallord William Turner Ship in a Storm c.1823–6

Events, dear things, events. What to make of them? Last Friday we had a day in which three of our governors talked for five hours with some young people who find school behaviour norms unbearably irksome, counselling them to do better. Monday we had the Smoothie Bike chefs creating nutritious snacks by the sheer power of the bicycle. They’re back next Monday.

Tuesday was Remembrance. Regular readers remember the digger man who joined our silence last year. Emboldened by success and in the name of preparing young Tallis for adult life, we decided this year’s silence should be in the heart of our community on the concourse, more usually a venue for hugging, arguing and standing about. An energetic colleague hatched a plan involving miles of red ribbon. Several plans later taking mud, bins, benches, trees and the weather forecast (he’s a geographer) into consideration we decided trust and freedom were the answer. So we stopped organising, hired a trumpeter, talked about it in assemblies and blew a whistle just before 11. Silence fell on a busy yard and canteen, everything stopped. The Last Post played for a sublime and serious silence in the heart of SE3.

When Reveille sounded we were so pleased with ourselves we had a good old clap as the pips went for lesson 3. The red ribbon, which we eventually wound round the bridge over the yard looked a bit bedraggled later so some younger members were detailed to remove it. They were so beset with helpful advice that time ran out and small girl tidied it up alone as dusk fell.

Immediately after the Armistice Lindsey Hilsum from Channel 4 News talked to the sixth form about reportage and foreign affairs. Her experiences were terrifyingly impressive: our questioning deeply incisive. Maybe we do learn from wars?

That night we had Tallis Strings with Michael Bochmann of Trinity Laban. He’s been with us courtesy of Clifford Chance to give some of year 7s a taste of the violin so that, playing alongside teachers and world-class Michael they experienced the joys of music and the ensemble. At a wonderful concert for family and friends one new player said to me "It is quite hard. The strings are really close together."

Wednesday we had workshops with a Danish colleague from the Kaospilots organisation. Their aim is to equip people to navigate through life’s chaos, and who wouldn’t want help with that? We’re using them to help think about Tallis Character to complement our Habits so that our young people may navigate whatever choppy waters are ahead for them.

We met in the evening to set up a new PTA-type organisation. 20 parent volunteers and a plate of school cakes, high hopes for partnership and a bit of fun. I heard the call of the first mince pie of the season. Thursday was post-16 Open Evening with hundreds coming to find out about how to get a hot ticket to adult life. Much praise for our vibrancy but also the precision of our advice. Young people are rightly much more demanding and together about what they want from the future. Those of us who lurched from one thing to another in the 70s are from another era altogether.

I’m reminded of a chance overhearing at the final celebrations of Black History Month in October. We had a lovely day and replaced the lesson change signal with startling music, generating a little dancing in the corridors. I heard a chap ask his chum ‘Is that coming through the pips machine?’ as if we have an Orwellian squirting device to move us in Pavlovian fashion or direct our every thought.

Would it help them steer through events if we did? It’s easy to write rules but hard to keep them, as the young people in front of the governors admit. It’s easy to watch a foreign correspondent but hard to contemplate being one. It’s lovely to hear a virtuoso but hard to be one, what with the strings being so close together and all. It’s good to drink a smoothie but hard to produce one by cycling.

Our daily life is a mixture of planned and unplanned events, challenges and opportunities. It is really hard to measure what schools do in any but the most obvious ways. We aim for education to change the world, but the world can be unpredictable, hostile and dangerous as well as exciting and interesting. That’s why we take character and habits so seriously. We want to know what best will help our young people navigate through the choppy waters of freedom and trust so they know when to be still for remembrance and when to dance to the pips.

CR 15.11.14

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Their Fate Will Be Our Fate Too

I like, I wish, I wonder

Lest we forget ourselves

Children and war

Love in the Crowd

Where do you go to my lovely?

Navigating Events

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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