A letter from The Head – 10 June 2026

Dear Parents,

The Great Unknowing

Some of the greatest thinkers, philosophers and spiritual guides understand that deep learning requires unlearning – the ability to suspend one’s understanding in order to make space for new learning and to see the world afresh, despite the sense of surety one has developed over time.

This great unknowing is intrinsically counterculture to the world of self-assured bluster that we are force-fed in the Western experience. It is a fragile space, to relinquish the facade of full understanding. But I believe we all need to travel this road if we are determined to arrive at a fuller experience of life in its richness.

It strikes me that this great unknowing challenges the ubiquity of an AI world galloping along at gigasecond speeds. AI promises an all-knowing, machine-driven existence that short-circuits the eternal process of knowing and unknowing – the very struggle that makes us human.

Forever, we humans have opted for the most efficient and the most expedient, some of which has afforded us lives of extreme comfort, luxury, and delight – especially if we happen to find ourselves on the fortunate side of the wealth curve. Adopting new technologies, in the form of AI, is no different. 

So why the concern?

In much the same way that hand-made goods, or a hand-made work of art, or an authentically hand-crafted musical composition illicit inspiration in comparison to that which is tellingly mass-produced by a machine – the wholesale adoption of the latest AI technology pushes us further and further from those attributes which hold our humanity.

As an educator of young people, I am confronted with the power of the machine at every opportunity for learning and at every opportunity to find a more expedient way to optimise thinking. Like most of us, every young person looks for the easiest route to completing a task. For today’s young people, outsourcing their thinking to the machine has become second nature. In fact, without a machine to prompt and then to be prompted along, tasks are often left undone.

And so, even at the risk of being left behind or missing out on the next technological advance, I believe schools should double-down on that which develops young minds, away from the machine.

If we have learnt anything in recent years, it is that many who study the brain are raising alarm bells about our seeming regression in thinking and reasoning, driven largely by our outsourcing of thinking to the machine and, tangentially, by a rapid decline in our ability to focus uninterrupted on a task as we fall increasingly under the spell of personalised algorithms. It seems to me that we, and our young people, are being dragged away from so many touchpoints which hold our humanity.

Surely our approach should thus be to concentrate our efforts on methods that embed our thinking processes and encourage learning skills and practices to help cement our human qualities.

My contention is that the machine should always be relegated to second place. We should never allow it to replace the mastering of skills that hold our humanity.

For example, teaching young people the art and craft of debate, through hypothesising and articulating a defence, is a critical human capability. So too is the ability to challenge a widely held and popular myth, especially when set against the force of a powerful algorithm. And finding the words to express one’s affection remains an inherently human act – one for which a soulless machine is wholly inadequate.

In conclusion, amid all the hype surrounding AI, AGI, and ASI, I concur with Pope Leo XIV, who in his first encyclical has sounded an alarm: humanity must remain vigilant in its wholesale adoption of these technologies, mindful of their dehumanising risk to our world.

As a school, I believe we owe our young people the promise of acquiring skills that will protect them in a world that is already, in many ways, Orwellian.

Regards,