Head's Blog | Parochial not provincial | Embley School, a private school in Hampshire

We hosted a wonderful open event last night. These occasions are really privileged events for me. Prospective parents are looking for a school for their children, a choice much more significant than almost any other we make as parents. Surrounded - perhaps even besieged - with a plethora of choice, it is really tough as a parent to make the choice. I’m not going to present a formula and I come with a caveat, I have a bias but if you are reading this you will already be aware.The most obvious and yet problematic question is for parents and indeed children to be clear in their minds about what it is they are looking for. Perplexed? Don't be. Specific criteria either by way of discipline, subject provision or where there are wider vocational choices may simplify the decision process. But, for the vast majority of parents we see, this sort of specialism is less the driving factor, so what is it you are looking for? 
 
‘I want my child to thrive and be the best version of themselves; I want them to be successful.’ The thriving is easy to imagine, but less so to deliver by the way, so too is success. To start with the latter. Success is open to interpretation, what makes a successful student? Does it depend on the course they go on to? Perhaps it is the accumulation of wealth? I think this question is really interesting and challenging. 
 
Increasingly our parents value success in nuanced and thoughtful ways. The successful child is one who is comfortable in their own skin, one who is able to chart the course of life with a values system on which rests a competence born of intellectual rigour and self-esteem. This self-esteem is honed in authentic engagement and grounded experiences of plans working well and plans washing out. What they do in life is ultimately a product of their being able to choose for themselves in an informed and openly reasoned way. 
 
Do you think I am labouring the point about making informed choices and being themselves? Jonathan Haight has written a very popular book called ‘The Anxious Generation’. He goes some way to unravel the influence of social media and smartphones, modern lifestyles and the impact on children. I don't pretend to have access to his research and my musings issue forth from the experience I have of the children and their engagement with the world. I am concerned that we are speeding further into not out of Plato’s Cave. There seems to be a preoccupation with a plastic perfection. What do I mean by that? Well, a striving for the wrong thing. Looking a particular way, doing a particular thing that is ‘just right’. I don't want this to come over in the wrong way, but the preoccupation with appearance or outwardly presenting myself to the world in a particular way that draws congratulation not opprobrium. Where is the confidence of the ordinary? The ease with the ragged? Perfection in my view is the enemy of progress. 
 
I have written here in earlier pieces about the difficulty of being ‘the best’, or even of this notion of ‘perfection’. It troubles me; I just don't think life is about that. It is difficult because as with parenting children, the direction of travel is less a static state of being than a dynamic process of becoming. The worry about being perfect prevents us being ourselves. Maybe this is what to look for as parents? Where does a school illustrate the process of becoming in a thoughtful measured way? How does the institution meet the individual? What is the relationship between both entities? Are programmes of study and capital projects just the polished end of what sort of process?
 
The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh had a way of looking at the world that transformed the poetry and poets that came after him. He called for a sensitive humility and sensitive courage. A sensitive humility which urges us to consider the inherent significance of the world exactly where we stand. Kavanagh cautioned against grandiose sweeping themes and the pretension of the cosmopolitan. His sensitive courage invites us to resist fashionable flashy trends and shallow comparisons with others in favour of cherishing where we are without cultural anxiety. Kavanagh distinguished between the outward pretension and inner emptiness of the ‘provincial’ shoring up of its own inadequacy with ‘show’ and the humble honesty and simple confidence of the ‘parochial’. It is an invitation to authenticity and maybe helpful in making a choice because it looks beyond the verbiage of marketing collateral and throws its doors open and invites you to come and see us as we are. 
 
The feedback from parents as the evening concluded was one of engaged, thoughtful children comfortable in themselves. Could this be what you are looking for? Where children are at home with their teachers, collaborating in challenge, grounded and unapologetically happy in belonging to the community; imperfect but improving; parochial not provincial.