FROM THE CHAIRMAN The necessity of curiosity One of the central tenets of Newington’s Hearts, Wings and Minds strategy is curiosity. It sounds pretty simple – ask a few questions, get a few answers – but curiosity is so much more. It’s the desire to know and learn, to probe and question, to wonder and explore. It’s the quest to understand and consider other experiences and points of view. It means engaging with respect with the others’ views, listening with an open mind – and perhaps even changing your position. A curious person isn’t in the game to win the point. They’re asking questions because they genuinely, intrinsically want to know. There’s a good reason schools like Newington try to cultivate curiosity. Research by Dr Matthias Gruber, a senior research fellow at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology, shows curiosity ‘puts the brain into a state that is generally conducive to learning any information’. And learning through critical thinking is, of course, what Newington is all about. Intellectual curiosity will set any student up well as they step into an unknowable, untested and febrile future. But there’s another kind of curiosity – empathic curiosity. It’s wanting to know what someone thinks and why they think it, how they feel, the personal impacts of their experiences. When our boys choose to connect deeply and authentically with others – in their mentor groups, with those from backgrounds and with beliefs different to their own, during their service learning activities – they are demonstrating empathic curiosity, a trait that will both ground them and open them to worlds and ways of thinking they might never have imagined. Imagine a world where we accepted things at face value: where fact and propaganda held equal status, where we remained uninterested in the achievements or plight or customs of others, where great stories remained untold because no one could be bothered to ask ‘And what happened next?’. Amid budgets, governance and strategy, one of our most important jobs on the Newington College Council is to stick our heads up, look out and wonder. What might things look like in the future? How do we prepare for them? What aren’t we expecting… but should be? In that context, I hope curiosity creates solutions and advances for the school. At the very least, it almost always reveals something more interesting than lack of curiosity. Albert Einstein once said: ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.’ Let’s hope there’s a bit of the great physicist in us all. Mr Tony McDonald Chairman, Newington College Council