Hesscairn
About 30 minutes from the outskirts out of the metropolis that sits at the meeting place of so many great civilisations, languages and cultures past and present, you could be forgiven for missing the stone gates, sitting shaded under gnarled, richly-leaved trees, that lead to Hesscairn, my favourite, though little-known school.
The drive invites you into the light open woods which border the school, clearly a place of childhood play, with evidence of outhouses and camps from the junior school children, but you also notice some of the sculptures that are so thoughtfully placed to provoke the adolescents who take to the woods to think or talk with friends in their ample down time. Beyond, foothills and mountains lead to adventure, and you’ll often see groups of students heading out to camp or explore.
When you first see the main school area, you are struck by its elegance. Though the original buildings are hundreds of years old, a spirit of human enterprise, bricolage and responsiveness has shaped them into a village, with atriums, cloisters and squares, where children and adults of all ages are mingled as they go about learning, talking, socialising and reading – these are places of thought and being. The school farm has a blurred border with the main school, and animals occasionally stray into areas where children might be having a lesson outside, causing a flurry of excitement.
The nearby metropolis means that for all its sense of retreat and safety, the cultural winds of the world blow through the school. And as it is a community school, for all its internationalism, children who elsewhere might go to specialised schools seamlessly take their place here as part of the community with a strong sense of inclusion and belonging.
The teachers here are equally diverse, and many are quirky, with passions and enthusiasms that are evident around the school. The teachers have a deep interest in and responsiveness to the individual children they grow with, and the children feel safe and stimulated by the conversations they have with their guardians. Parents are often in and out of classrooms, supporting, helping and learning. Classrooms often have all their high windows and doors open, and classes spill out on to grass or between year groups. Learning is infused wherever you look, but with an understated grace which stops it ever feeling like anything but curiosity and pleasure.
Whilst there is a comforting quiet and sense of history, the children are clearly engaged with the politics and technology of today and regularly go out to the metropolis to participate in the avantgarde of culture, art and technology. This relationship between school and metropolis also allows Hesscairn students to engage in aesthetics and cultivate an appreciation for nature, art, music, theatre and all the wonderful things that provide foundations for a love of the beauty of life and other people. Spirituality is cultivated, not prescribed. It is everywhere from the meditation room to the silent glades of the forest. The metropolis means that the students come from a hundred cultures but find common ground at Hesscairn.
The learning is planned, but as a negotiation between the student and teacher, based on the rich conversations the teachers have in their quiet evenings as they sit and talk under trees in the dappled twilight. The teachers are passionate about knowledge and understanding of the world. They enjoy the life they lead with the children, always discovering and exploring together. Staff largely live on campus, spaced out in the woods, and some in boarding houses, where flexible boarding allows students to decide how and when they would like to be a part of the resident school community. Boundaries are fluid at Hesscairn, and family and school life are hard to distinguish – yet there is privacy when needed for all. Students who graduate from Hesscairn often come back to the school to revisit a place that gave them a bedrock of a good life. It is noticeable how diverse the paths they pick are, and yet they seem to share a kindness for others and appreciation for life that stays with those who have lived within the community.
But as George Orwell said in his essay about the perfect pub (Orwell, 1946), now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already, there is no such place as Hesscairn. There may well be a school of that name, but I don’t know of it. I know of many schools with many of these qualities. Hesscairn is speculative fiction. Hesscairn is a method to allow us to articulate what we want for our children and how we envision a better way of doing education.
I would imagine we all have a different Hesscairn. That is mine today, though it will shift and change over time. Hesscairn is SF, (speculative fabulation, speculative fiction, science fiction etc.) and an invitation to dream and do. How will your engagement with learning design help create joy, elegance and wonder in learning?
Image created by Stuart MacAlpine, using ChatGPTgenerative AI, based on a description of Hesscairn.
