Open hearts, open minds

More than ever before it feels like we are living in a changing world. Personally, I find this quite exciting as change presents us with new opportunities. But some aspects of the changes we are facing right now as a society are more threatening. I was reflecting on Monday that it was the third time this term alone that we had marked a terrible tragedy with a minute’s silence – Manchester, London Bridge, Grenfell Towers, and on Monday morning itself, a white van drove into a crowd of Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park.

National and global politics have been no less unpredictable – a year ago today, the U.K. voted to leave the European Union. Less than a year later, Theresa May’s grip on power looks increasingly questionable. Donald Trump swept to victory and shocked the world, but Emmanuel Macron in France put the populist forces firmly back in their box in the French elections last month.

In a changing world, with lots of voices shouting for attention on Twitter, Instagram and Buzzfeed, it can be easy to be swept along with the crowd. At the start of the election campaign the Labour Party was 20 points behind the Conservatives. By the time the final votes were counted, just 2 percentage points separated them from the Tories. In the wake of Grenfell, Mrs May has seemed cold and officious, Mr Corbyn a man of the people. A picture, taken in the glimpse of an eye, can make and destroy a reputation.

What is most important at times of change, which we all go through at different periods of our lives, is to be true to our values. This principle is as important for South Hampstead as a school as it is for our pupils as individuals. You will all know the torch as an emblem on our school crest – a symbol of our long tradition of enlightened, liberal education; of our bright and sparky pupils; of our passion for brilliant ideas and debate. Light is intimately connected with learning – as is our school motto, Mehr Licht, the words of the 18th century German poet Goethe on this deathbed… The torch also serves as a reminder of our core values: Thoughtfulness, Open-heartedness, Respect, Courage and Honesty. The value I want to talk about this morning is Open-heartedness. In fact our under-pinning ethos as a school, ‘Opening doors, hearts and minds’, is because that is what a great education should do.

So if I asked you what being open-hearted meant, what would you say? Being open-hearted for me is about being open to other people – not just to those in our immediate families and friendship groups. It is about understanding how other people are feeling, walking a mile in their shoes. It is about kindness.

Today we are demonstrating open-heartedness by wearing Green and raising money for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. Over the past year you have raised over £20k for our school in Cambodia. Next year I would like us to reinstate the tradition of a school walk to raise money for charity.

But open-heartedness is not just about bigger gestures like these. It is about our daily interactions with our peers. It is about sitting next to someone at lunch who is not part of your friendship group, club, clique, gang, whatever we might want to call it. It is about engaging someone in conversation who is perhaps that little bit more shy and hanging on the edges of a group. It is about being inclusive, not exclusive. It is about inviting someone along to spend lunch break with you, either to chat or attend an activity together. It is about being sensitive when discussing birthday parties or weekend plans to those you may not have invited but would quite have liked an invitation. It is about realising that friendship groups should not have impenetrable borders, but can welcome new people in. It is about making room for a newcomer in a circle of friends chatting. When I go to parties or networking events – oh the glamour – I am always deeply unimpressed when I see grown adults guilty of shutting others out through the way they stand. A number of you have joined South Hampstead this year and I sincerely hope that you now feel like members of our community.

Above all, open-heartedness is about remembering how our actions, our words, our facial expressions and our body language will make other people feel. You may be familiar with a principle in Ethics called Utilitarianism or the principle of Greatest Happiness. It was a theory developed by the great Victorian writer John Stuart Mill. The theory is that we must strive to create the greatest amount of happiness we can.

However, short-lived happiness at the expense of somebody else’s long term suffering was not, in Mill’s view, acceptable. Ridiculing others or gossiping about them is a good case in point. It may make us laugh or pique our curiosity, but our short term pleasure has a heavy price. Social media is here to stay and actually I don’t want to spend an entire assembly lambasting it because social media can be great fun in perfectly harmless ways (e.g. the furore about the Queen’s Hat that erupted on Twitter this week when Her Majesty opted for a blue hat with yellow flowers which bore a suspicious resemblance to the EU flag.) Social media can inform and influence for the better. Think of change.org.

But one thing it has done is made us a more reactive society. We like, share, retweet, pin, post and tag, often unthinkingly. We are digitally hard wired to react. This is the equivalent of blurting out the first thing that comes into our heads in real life. Generally we manage to avoid doing that because the presence of real life human beings around us stops us from saying really stupid things. On social media, we are wrapped in a little virtual bubble and we forget that real people are at the receiving end of our words. If we had two rules for our behaviour online, it should be these:

• Never say online something you would not say to somebody’s face. Otherwise we are guilty not just of cruelty but also of cowardice.
• What happens on social media can stay online forever.

Being open-hearted is not just something you should do because South Hampstead tells you to. Being open-hearted and reaching out to other people is not just a decent thing to do, it is good for you. The Greek philosopher Socrates believed that being virtuous, doing the right thing, was good for your soul, and conversely that it was damaging for your soul to do the wrong thing. In other words, being kind is good for us. Being kind can make us happy. A study by the University of Oxford published last October suggested that kindness could increase our overall happiness by 10%. This was widely reported as not being very significant but I think being 10% happier sounds pretty good to me. Being open-hearted is something I think many of you will have to do in the workplace. In an increasingly globalised world, you will probably have to work with people from all sorts of different cultural, national and religious backgrounds. South Hampstead is a cosmopolitan community and prepares you well for this already. Being comfortable working and conversing with people outside our comfortable friendship groups is really important.

Some Europeans now view Britain as a rather closed-hearted place because of our decision as a nation a year ago today to leave the European Union. The rights and wrongs of that vote are not really for me to comment on, and indeed it would be closed-minded and closed-hearted of me to make assumptions about individuals from either the Leave or Remain camps. But whatever happens, if all of you remain open-minded and open-hearted, more doors will open for you.

Blog post by Vicky Bingham, Headmistress from 2017 to 2023.