Nurturing our spiritual and moral values
Living together
Like pupils at any day school, boys at Summer Fields need a comprehensive framework of spiritual and moral values if they are to thrive and fulfil their full potential in the school community. As a boarding school, the need for such a framework is intensified – and so is the potential for shaping boys’ lives morally and spiritually in a profound and positive way.
Summer Fields is a home from home for our Boarders. School for them is not just a place where they learn: it is the place where they live 24 hours a day. As such, we can expect to see the very worst of a boy’s behaviour – when he is ill, tired or ragged – and we know that we will also see the very best in terms of his maturity, altruism and empathy for other people.
What is true of the boys is also true of the staff. Many visitors remark on the tangible sense of mutual respect which staff and pupils enjoy at Summer Fields. Relationships of trust here are built as much by affirming each other’s strengths as learning to accept each other’s weaknesses. A teacher may gain a boy’s respect in the class room, but this is enormously enhanced when the same adult is clearing up his sick at two o’clock in the morning; and when the boy then gives a knowing wink later that morning when his same teacher is weary and exasperated in the classroom.
Trust and mutual respect are contagious. New boys (especially late-entry boys) take time to adjust to the responsibilities of belonging to the Summer Fields community – but it is rare for them not to catch on within their first term.
Shaping young lives
Boys at Summer Fields receive moral and spiritual guidance from a wide variety of sources. This reflects our multi-layered approach to pastoral care. If a boy in my form has ‘borrowed’ someone’s trainers, for example, he and his class will have input on the morality (or rather, the immorality) of ‘borrowing’ from:
• His Form Master – perhaps as part of a PHSE lesson
• His Tutor
• His games coach
• The Deputy Headmaster during assembly
• The Chaplain in Chapel
• His Lodge-parent
This may sound like over-kill, but it reflects the reality that boys relate more easily to some staff than to others. The message usually gets through!
For most boys at Summer Fields the three most significant adults in the school side of their lives are their Tutor, their Lodge-parent and their Form Master. At times of crisis, these three can work very closely together to provide a comprehensive network of care, advice and support for even the most troubled of boys.
The role of the Religious Studies Department
Staff in the RS department provide a valuable resource for boys at Summer Fields to form their own ideas and opinions about spiritual and moral issues. During their time at Summer Fields pupils study Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism in great depth. Considerable care is taken to help boys discover their own respect for people of other faiths and this, inevitably, spills over into pupils’ relationships with their peers. For example, studying Islam in the Third Year has helped pupils understand (and respect) one of the boys who was fasting from food and water throughout the entire school day during Ramadan.
RS lessons are almost exclusively academic. In the classroom, for example, the Chaplain teaches RS as an academic theologian rather than as an Anglican priest. The boys appreciate this and they feel free to express their own atheistic or agnostic opinions. This standpoint of academic objectivity also allows our most able senior pupils to explore the difference and contradictions between world faiths – and to argue about the merits and demerits of significant moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia, nuclear deterrent, terrorism, propaganda.
In addition, the high level of respect and trust enjoyed between staff and senior pupils gives these older boys remarkable freedom to explore the moral and ethical issues which concern them – namely the illness or death of a parent or sibling; how they should react to peer-pressure; what life-choices they should make to become fulfilled individuals.
If life at Summer Fields develops boys’ self-awareness, it is often in their final year RS lessons that pupils find an opportunity to explore their own morality – and to express their frustrations as emergent adults.
A family learning together
To view Summer Fields as a school and nothing else would be, I suggest, to miss something exciting and unique. We are a school – a place where teachers teach and pupils learn – but we are more than that. We are a family – a community of trust and respect where at the end of the day (quite literally) even the youngest and least able boys can experience the thrill of teaching their teachers how to live.