Great company

I got a Christmas card this morning. You may have had one already, OK, it’s not a competition. I received mine from the children in Reception. We had gathered in the Old Library to celebrate a long standing tradition of sending our letters to Father Christmas.

Every child in turn had detailed their requests and to be fair to them they were many and varied. I suspect Father Christmas will be busy, not sure where you might get a model Tesla at reasonably short notice, but no doubt he will figure it out. The conversations with the children afterwards were equally enlightening, apparently there is some concern that Father Christmas will have an appetite both for wine and biscuits. I couldn’t possibly comment, but again I am sure he will figure it out.

The subject of the conversations I have with the children occupied some of the thoughts I shared with the parents who brought children for taster days over the past two weeks. I have sometimes been asked by parents about what sort of child comes to Embley. Invariably I am a bit puzzled by the question and usually ask in return, ‘I don’t know, what sort of child comes to your home?’ I don’t think there is a ‘type’ and, if there is, the children at Embley are too preoccupied with being their best to try to conform to one. ‘We are all individuals… I’m not’ …came the voice from the Monty Python crowd. The conversation I have in the morning as the children arrive can be as easy as what the weather is doing or how well things are going. They can touch on progress and things getting better or how injury is getting in the way and shared feelings of frustration. From time to time I am visited by those looking for lost shoes or the like and, more often than you might think possible, by bus drivers dropping off the bags children got onto the bus with and have forgotten during the journey. All part of the rich tapestry of first thing in the morning at Embley.

Then there are the conversations that go a bit deeper. Over the past few days I have been entertained in discussion about the significance of the third estate in the French revolution. The tennis court oath was less about wearing the right kind of whites and more about how a rising middle class sought to limit the authority of a monarch while looking out for their own interests. We went on to consider how revolutionary movements played themselves out and whether there was a degree of inevitability that Napoleon would follow the Terror, the strong man restoring order to chaos. Beethoven was taken in by it for a while and the romantic hero of the third symphony exercised Teutonic temper when the Corsican crowned himself Emperor. We would go on to consider reviews of Ridley Scott’s new film and how the director of TV ads for wholemeal bread ended up in Hollywood: the career will find you if you focus on doing what you love and do it to the best of your ability. We went on to consider the role of cinema in setting the national or international zeitgeist. The review of medieval scholasticism interrupted the flow and consideration of the nature of Truth and an objective or subjective construct led on to consideration of the essence versus existence debate. The conversation swept forward to look at how Dickensian Miss Havisham models how not to deal with heartbreak and the profound sadness that life can dispense. We touched on Schrodinger’s love of cats or more accurately the challenge of the wave-particle duality; why Kipchoge can maintain his pace over a marathon and the significance of Kissinger on modern politics. We enjoyed sharing stories about Petrarch whom some found a self-indulgent narcissist and the inevitability of tilting at windmills at some point in life, ironic really as they go about their own journeys playing both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The talk turned to ploughing and tilling, from Deere to Fendt, to pheasant and shoots. We lamented the Land Rover and lacklustre rugby. We talked about leading and following, modelling belief and being authentic.

I wonder what you make of all that reader? The ebb and flow of conversation is far reaching and all encompassing. That is the sort of student at Embley. In the course of my conversations I find them to be thoughtful and challenging. I appreciate the latter most of all. Their spirit of enquiry, their gentle curiosity and fascination with a world they are coming to know and trying to understand. In so many ways they are both in it and yet not of it. They have an idealism that is humbling and without humbug, their appreciation of the challenge that they inherit may well spring from the nature of youth but more probably from this and the context they find themselves in. They have the capacity and the opportunity to be renaissance individuals, they have their pet likes and dislikes but none of the parochialism of partisanship. They are citizens of the world with a world view and an expectation of responsibility for it lived locally. Maybe they are children of a new logic. They are being and becoming, proud and humble; idealist pragmatists. They are all of this and more, one thing do know for sure, they are great company.