Concordia Magazine 2025

We cannot pay lip service to good pastoral care and kindness while tolerating bullying adult behaviour. If our values are to be respected and upheld, they must be lived. The result is a diffuse but pervading atmosphere of benevolence, warmth and kindness, and one in which boundaries are known and policed. If our approach is too lax, children will inevitably learn to push harder to discover where the boundary lies. However, if we become too authoritarian there is no space for caring. Further, the children simply learn to be compliant rather than understand and grapple with morality itself. Those schools that require children to walk silently, in single file, between lessons and make spirit-crushing demands of absolute submission are not teaching values that will sustain autonomous, powerful adults. They are training servants. I want to enable our students to think and act in moral as well as intellectual terms. Their sense of right and wrong should be owned by them; pastoral care is there to enable them to achieve that goal rather than provide them with any specific moral template. When pupils behave well, it should be as a result of their freely willed, joyous choice. And kindness is at the heart of it all. As the Dalai Lama said, ‘Whenever possible, be kind. It is always possible’.

I should like our pupils to have moral agency within the world, acting altruistically in using their strength to support others.

7 Concordia Winter 2025