St Edmund's

Spaces of thoughtfulness

One of our responsibilities as teachers, is to encourage our students to appreciate beauty – be that in works of art and music, the natural world or even in the complexity of a mathematical equation.

In my assemblies this term, I have been discussing unusual and fascinating locations – inspired in part by Travis Elborough’s “Atlas of Improbable Places” which I read over the summer. Today, I talked about the Lake District – improbably beautiful and of extraordinary cultural significance.

The aesthetic tone was set nicely at the start of assembly by a pupil string quartet who gave us a perfect rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

I talked about the spectacular beauty of the Lake District and the inspirational effect it had on the “Lake Poets” (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) and artists like Turner in addition to impact of the environment on John Ruskin’s model of harmonious living between people and nature.

My choice of the Lake District for assembly today wasn’t accidental. Our Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award students has just returned from a successful expedition and so it dovetailed nicely with Vice-Captain of School Joseph Goodwin’s report on that trip. It was great to hear about the challenges and achievements that they faced in this wonderfully improbable place.

Visiting such locations give us psychological distance from our daily difficulties, creating what Ruskin called “spaces of thoughtfulness”.   In our claustrophobic, cluttered modern existence, finding these spaces has never been more important.

Ed O’Connor
Head