With Kings

There are lots of strange coincidences in life. Last weekend I was entertained to hear a phrase we use at Embley being used in a very different context and for a very different audience.

Andy Farrell spoke about the preparation for the Ireland game against Wales by saying that the team focused on being and only on being the best version of themselves. It is an approach that has defined Embley for the past seven years.

This week we hosted the first in the new season of open mornings. They are always opportunities to think about what we are and what we do as much as to think about why we do it. Just yesterday I was speaking with a journalist, and a series of prospective parents, and was asked what defines us. But perhaps before answering that, I should step back a pace and ask my audience what they are looking for?

Invariably parents want their children to be in a school where they will be successful and happy. Last Tuesday I invited the parents at Open Morning to consider both themes carefully and to be careful of what they wished for. Are the children successful because they are happy or happy because they are successful? On the face of it, the proposition may seem tautologous, but it is far from the case.

Children who are happy because they are successful hold their happiness hostage to the vagaries of fortune. That indifferent master comes and goes with the fickleness of a feline. The successful children – because they are happy – will always have success because they own its operation and means of production. I know lots of successful people, only some of them would say they are happy (on the other hand there are no happy people I know who would declare themselves unsuccessful).

So, what is the measure of success? This may be open to some subjective interpretation but let’s have a go with a few ideas. Is it about status and material possession? Is success defined externally by what you have or by the position you occupy? Positions come and go as do possessions, they are ephemeral and the so-called ‘success’ they bring in their train may be fleeting. If success is defined more immediately and personally, if it is the quality of a life well lived authentically where the choices I make come from a disposition that puts others first, then that happiness and success is more lasting. I would argue that success and happiness are not a dichotomy but intimately if not intrinsically linked. 

It will be no surprise to readers of this piece how much I am concerned by the invitation open to us all, through a variety of media, to enter the modern equivalent of Plato’s cave. The invitation proffers us the opportunity to dance among and to play with the shadows as they flit to-and-fro on the wall of the cave. The silhouetted figures taken for reality invite us to want more, do more, have more. It breeds a dissatisfaction with our current state, remember the Bard: “I all alone beweep my outcast state,” as I pine for the life lived by others. Wanting to be other and to do other, drawing inevitable and irrevocable comparison with a myth.

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

True happiness is in being the best version of ourselves, in investing ourselves in a project that is bigger than us and to which we may contribute. The social action work that the children undertake enriches those whom they visit for sure, but it enriches their own lives considerably more, and to a far deeper degree than the boisterous baubles of the barracking Bacchus of social media invention. The children at Little Roses, our partner school in Ghana, benefit from the work our children do with them, but far more do we benefit from being in their company and recognising that authentic schools exist without walls in the hearts and minds of those who gather in a shared place with a common purpose. 

So, what has this to do with us? Well, what I am writing about here is something that cannot be tested and defies measurement, but you know it when you see it. We are a successful school because we are a happy school invested in a project that sees us involved in the formation of children who will make the world a better place, not least because they are accomplished, humble, self-assured scholars, with compassion in their hearts for others. And to paraphrase the Bard again, while all the world changes and goes about its business, the business of Embley is to look after children and allow each one to be their best.

…this remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings