What a term that lies ahead of us! It shall be action packed as ever and we are all ready for it and good to go, after what I hope for all of you too has been a very good holiday.
Those of you who found yourselves, as I did, rather glued to the news over the Easter break will have been transfixed by NASA’s Artemis II mission, as four astronauts made their extraordinary journey around the Moon. There is something almost impossibly stirring about the thought of those crew members gazing back at our planet from that vast, silent distance, seeing the whole of it at once, this luminous blue marble suspended in the dark, every one of its eight billion inhabitants invisible and yet somehow, entirely present. From up there, there are no borders, no postcodes, no school pickup traffic, just Earth, and it was following this mission which in part inspired me to come up with our assembly theme for this term.
We know of course that what those astronauts were looking at is anything but simple because every single one of us who lives on this planet carries within us a quite extraordinary complexity of identity. This term, therefore, in our assemblies in the Pre-Prep & Prep we are going to explore exactly that. Our theme is The People on Our Planet.
In my first assembly on Tuesday, I asked the boys and the staff in the Prep to think about how they might consider their identity, as in, coming from a continent, a nation or a cultural group within that nation? The answer, of course, is that we are all of these things, and more. I believe our identities cannot always sit under a single neat label but are in fact made up from a complex, interwoven tapestry of where we come from, who raised us, what languages live in our homes, what food is on our tables, what stories have been handed down to us and what dreams we are busily building for ourselves.
Being a human being, I put it to the boys, is a quite joyous and wonderful thing! To understand ourselves as people I also strongly feel we must understand where we come from. And to understand one another (our friends, our classmates, our community) we must be genuinely curious about those layers in the people around us too. These layers do not compete with one another, in my view, instead they compound; they make us richer, deeper and more interesting. Our backgrounds, our heritages, our lived experiences, none of these are incidental to who we are, they are the very substance of it.
Over the coming weeks, we will be unpacking all of this together in our assemblies at both the Pre-Prep and in the Prep, and I very much look forward to seeing where it takes us. If the Artemis astronauts could see the beauty of our complexity from a quarter of a million miles away, just imagine how much more carefully and sensitively we might understand that when we simply take the time to see each other properly, right here, from about three feet away.
Welcome back – it is going to be a wonderful term!
