Dear Students and Families,
Welcome back to H-FARM, and a warm welcome to those joining our community for the first time.
There is always something magical about new beginnings, and perhaps nowhere is this more true than at the start of a new school year. However familiar the buildings, classrooms and faces may be, a new year opens a space of possibility in which friendships begin and deepen, questions emerge that we cannot yet anticipate, mistakes become occasions for growth, talents reveal themselves and minds change.
When I welcomed our staff back this year, I began with an image from Heraclitus: the bow and the lyre. Both depend upon tension. Without it, the bow cannot send the arrow forward and the lyre cannot make music. Heraclitus understood that harmony is not the absence of difference, but the right relationship between forces that pull in different directions. I think this is a beautiful image for a school, because education itself lives within such tensions: ambition and care, independence and belonging, tradition and innovation, knowledge and curiosity, the extraordinary possibilities of technology and those essentially human things that no technology can replace.
The question, therefore, is not always which side we should choose, but whether we can learn to hold the relationship well as doing that requires attention. Attention is much more than concentration. It is a way of meeting the world. What we attend to, what we choose to notice, what we repeatedly give our time and thought to gradually shapes the world we experience and, in turn, the people we become. This matters particularly now, because we live in a time in which our attention is constantly being sought, interrupted and monetised. Speed, novelty, immediacy and distraction are among the powerful currents of our age. Technology and AI can enormously enlarge what we are able to do, but they cannot tell us what deserves our attention, what is worth loving, or what kind of life is worth living. Those questions remain ours, and so too does the question of beauty.
Schools must, of course, prepare young people for the world. They must equip them with knowledge, skills and the capacity to act within it. But education becomes impoverished when everything has to justify itself by its immediate usefulness. There are things we cultivate precisely because their value cannot be measured in this way: music, literature, mathematics pursued beyond necessity, languages, art, conversation, craftsmanship, the contemplation of nature, or simply the pleasure of understanding something because it is worth understanding.
Such things may at first appear unnecessary, and yet they are often among those that make life bearable, spacious and rich. They give breadth when life becomes narrow, depth when it becomes superficial, and meaning where utility alone cannot reach. Beauty asks something particular of us because it requires that we stop, notice and attend, and this is also why intentionality matters. A good life, like a good school, does not emerge accidentally. We have to cultivate what we wish to grow.
The same is true of relationships. We sometimes speak as though people exist first and relationships are simply the lines connecting them, but I increasingly think that the reverse is closer to the truth. We become ourselves through our relationships: with parents, teachers, friends, ideas, places, traditions and the world around us. A school, therefore, is not primarily a collection of individuals who happen to share a campus. It becomes a community through the quality of attention we give to one another, and those relationships have to be nurtured deliberately.
From attention and relationship follows another essential part of education: choice. Part of growing up is learning that freedom does not mean treating every possible choice as equally good. Some choices enlarge us, while others diminish us; some habits strengthen our attention, while others weaken it; some behaviours build trust, while others corrode it. Temptations are often powerful precisely because they are immediate, fashionable or easy.
Every age has its Zeitgeist, and every Zeitgeist has its seductions. Education should give young people enough knowledge, judgement and inner freedom to recognise them rather than simply be carried along by them. Our task is not to make every decision for our students. It is to help them become people capable of choosing well: knowing when to persevere and when to change direction, when to speak and when to listen, when technology is serving them and when they are beginning to serve it, when to follow others and when they must have the courage to stand apart.
As we begin 2026–27, I hope we can enter the year with ambition, but also with attention; with excitement for the future, but also with discernment; with independence and with a deep awareness of the relationships that sustain us. And I hope we will continue to leave room for what is not immediately useful: for wonder, beauty, conversation, friendship, reflection, play and the slow discovery of things whose significance may only become clear much later.
Education is, after all, partly an act of faith in what may grow from seeds whose fruits we cannot yet see.
I wish you all a joyful, rich and meaningful year ahead.
Un caro saluto,
Emiliano Cori
Head of School