A place for unhistoric acts
The Manchester bomb felt very close indeed to some of the LRGS community. Many of our pupils and parents know people who were at the concert or were directly affected by that terrible event.
The Bishop of Manchester said: “Today is a day to mourn, to pray, and to reaffirm our determination that murder will never defeat us.” As a school community, it is right that we have done all those things this week.
When terrible storms rage, as they will for a many of our pupils at some point, school acts as a place of great normality. “When the world outside appears to have fallen apart, teachers will make sure the world inside remains reassuringly familiar,” another head wrote this week.
Schools are also places of open debate, as our pupils develop their opinions on the world and the ways they hope to change it.
They are places of friendship, recognition and joy.
They are places where the best of values are hammered out and passed on, generation by generation: generosity, kindness, decency, leadership, service.
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch: “and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Many of us will never be able to forget that appalling day at the Manchester Arena. Our school must also be a place for the hidden, unhistoric acts which quietly show humanity at its best.