Headmaster's Newsletter Friday 27 June 2025

Dear Parents,

It was almost exactly a year ago that, standing in the Norman cathedral in Monreale, one of our Year 8s turned to me and said ‘I can see why you brought us here now; I thought we were going to be looking at just another church or something’. Situated a short drive from Palermo (well, it can be quite a long drive in Palermitan traffic) in the north-west of Sicily, the cathedral was built between 1170 and 1189. It has Byzantine mosaics made from 2,200kg of pure gold. On the outside of the cathedral there are beautiful arches and other examples of stonework which fuse Arab, Byzantine and Norman influences. It really is quite something, so it was a relief when the aforementioned pupil (tired from a very early flight) got that this was somewhere beautiful.

There is an increasingly long list that society and governments expect schools to teach young people. Forgetting that there are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a week, so many weeks in a month, and so many months in a year, the expectation is that as the list gets longer, schools will magically bend time to fit in whatever it is that other areas of society don’t want to do themselves. Assuming that we don’t have those magical powers, schools are increasingly forced to nudge out certain things. I suggest that the appreciation of beauty was nudged out of many educational settings a long time ago, and that it will be under threat in those settings that have so far persisted. This is also, of course, because some social commentators argue that ‘beauty’ is subjective (although sometimes it really isn’t), and ‘elitist’ (whatever that means). Yet the appreciation of beautiful things – music, art, whatever – is one of the true joys of life. And I would dare to suggest that if society were truly invested in turning around the low levels of happiness nationally among young people, then perhaps introducing them to some beautiful things might help. Indeed, a team at the University of Cambridge is promoting the idea of ‘psychological distancing’ (and the mental health benefits that this brings) that comes from looking at a piece of art and asking ‘why is this beautiful?’. I’m far happier looking at the Sheldonian, say, than the brutalist back of Wadham library (which also happens to be the view from my front room).