Principal

St Catherine of Alexandria 

I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about getting students back to campus than I was at the start of this term! Over the course of the break, the hoardings and barricades came down, and I wanted to witness the girls’ response as months of drilling, craning, digging, and building slowly but surely slipped away, to reveal a building that St Catherine of Alexandria would surely have been at home in! 

The end result is stunning not least because it embodies the very essence of our holistic education model with its gymnasium, recital centre, tuition rooms, black-box theatre, Winter Garden, rooftop terrace, academic spaces, and round table in the Socratic tradition. All of which, is brought together by an architectural aesthetic that is intended to shape the very quality of thought and life within it. It is, in short, a building that embodies an idea of what learning is and the girls love it!

Our namesake would have loved it, too. St. Catherine of Alexandria is the patron saint of philosophers, scholars, students, teachers, and librarians, after all. According to tradition, she was a highly educated and noble young woman in the 4th Century who converted to Christianity at the age of 14. When Emperor Maxentius persecuted Christians, she debated and converted dozens of pagan philosophers he sent to challenge her, thereby providing us with an excellent role model for debating, oratory and higher order thinking – skills needed more than ever before in this Age of Distraction. 

To this end, I was pleased to read that the University of Chicago Law School is banning laptops, tablets, and phones from first-year classrooms as part of their commitment to learning. Lecturers will designate “classroom scribes” who can use electronic devices to take notes for the class or authorise electronic device use for interactive polling etc. but otherwise, it’s a return to reading, writing and listening for firing neural pathways and aiding memory retention. You’ll recall that we did the same with our Year 7s earlier this year, when we delayed the introduction of laptops for the first six weeks, prompted to action not only by the educational benefits but just as importantly, by the social-emotional ones and the results exceeded all expectations.

And with 16 Nobel Laureates, calling for urgent legal, ethical and social preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI, it is clear that thoughtful, intentional decisions are needed. In their statement entitled We Must Act Now and released on 16 July, “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” they call on economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to deepen research on AI’s economic impacts so that we can begin to build the policies and institutions needed to ensure AI complements human capabilities and benefits society before it’s too late to act. 

Human formation and human endeavour remain as always, our raison d’etre and as you walk in through the Heyington Gates, I hope you will stop to ponder and to touch the relocated sculpture by world renowned artist and Old Girl, Lisa Roet who, with the ape as her muse, has given us an image of the natural world that’s arresting in its accuracy and moving in its familiarity.

Nil Magnum Nisi Bonum. 

Ms Natalie Charles

Principal