One story which seems to feature a great deal is the Australian ban on social media for the Under 16s and whether we should introduce such a ban in the UK. We have always restricted use of mobile phones in the School and I have no doubt that there are huge advantages to this approach. I pointed out to the pupils earlier this year that I was tidying out my parents’ house and found all sorts of wonderful objects: an old torch, a type writer, a calculator, a cassette deck, a record player, an alarm clock, piles of maps, any number of dictionaries, and a wonderful copy of the famous 1912 Encyclopaedia Britannica. All these objects were ranged upon some shelving. It occurred to me that they had all become redundant because of one object – the mobile phone. Rarely, if ever, has a more powerful tool been created. And yet, so often, one sees people becoming enslaved by their phones. People seem to be unable to be parted from them, shaping their lives around their phones, conversations with others being interrupted and dictated by the incessant demands of this small object. As ever, and it is the same with AI, so long as we think of our phones as spectacularly useful tools, they are worth more than their weight in gold (and the gold price is very high at the moment); but if our phones control us, then the Sci Fi nightmare of machines taking over lives has become a reality!
Please take a look at the summary of this weeks’ Pastoral Parent Seminar on Screentime which has many helpful suggestions.

I have been away from the School for three days this week involved in an inspection at another school. It is always an extremely interesting process and there is so much to learn from the way that other schools do things. I returned on Friday morning, pleased to be back on familiar ground. It was not long before this pleasure turned into excitement as I approached the classroom in which PrePrep were gathering for their assembly. As I walked through the door, pupils rushed up to me: “Hello Mr Murray!” said one. “Mr Murray; it’s you!” pronounced another, reassuringly. It’s Mr Murray!” warned a third, at which point the gathering crowd started chanting “Good Morning Mr Murray!” in unison. I responded appropriately, “Good morning everyone. I was quite pleased to be back, ” I continued, “but now I’m extremely happy to be back. Why do you think that is?” “Is it because you’re happy to see us?” asked an insightful member of the crowd. “Yes!” I responded, “I’ve missed you!” At this point a tiny voice in the front row piped up “Mr Murray, I’ve missed you too. ” No wonder I love visiting Pre-Prep!

Indeed, I knew that I was back at Christ Church when I found myself sitting at a lunch table with four pupils, one from China, one from Taiwan and England, one from England and America and one from England and Italy. The conversation ranged over a number of topics: different ways of numbering – in German the numbers are reversed as in one and twenty, in French there is no word for eighty, they say four twenties; in Mandarin there is no word for sixty, they say six tens. We then moved on to thinking about why irregular verbs were often the most commonly used ones; then we discussed the simple nature of Mandarin Chinese beyond the accent and the characters; whether Mandarin used the same word for he and she (apparently the answer is that while the character is the same, the pronunciation is different). Then we discussed whether it was Chairman Mao who had introduced simplified characters (the answer seems to be yes but they already existed); where Chairman Mao came from (Hunan) and the fact that he spoke with a local Hunan accent. We moved on to a discussion of whether Chairman Mao’s approach was good for the economy of China (the view was that he had not been at the time but that he laid the foundations for later leaders to expand the economy.) We then moved on to the population of Chongquin (over 9 Million) and the nature of the mountains dividing Chima and their effect upon the population of the country. The remarkable thing was that all of the four pupils were able to contribute to the discussion and it was I who learnt the most.