Speech Day 2025

The 2025 School year came to a close at Speech Day and featured some important words of encouragement and inspiration from the Chairman of Trustees, the Acting Headmaster and our guest speaker, His Excellency the Honourable Andrew Bell, Lieutenant-Governor of NSW AC (OS 1983). Below are some key excerpts from their addresses. The complete transcripts will be published in the upcoming 2025 edition of The Sydneian.

Professor Eric Knight

Sydney Grammar School exists to prepare intellectually bright and ambitious boys for university study, and then life beyond. But at a time when universities are reflecting on their purpose, that is a particularly challenging exercise. Should universities be places of activist research, scholarly research, or both? Is there a difference? When is a robust and fulsome debate civil? When does it bump up against psycho-social safety? What is meant by academic freedom? And how is it different to freedom of speech? If Grammar is meant to prepare boys for university life, then they must be sure-footed in navigating these kinds of issues. To do that, Grammar must make the boys ready for challenging ideas and not make those ideas safe for the boys. That requires nurturing curiosity over a fear of controversy; and cultivating a capacity for intellectual freedom that allows them to form their own judgement about the world.

Acting Headmaster Mr Philip Barr

I believe Grammar is an institution dedicated to the pursuit of what is good. A place where boys pursue worthwhile things in the company of like-minded others. A place where significant encounters take place between boys and other boys, boys and masters, Tutors, Housemasters, sports coaches, music teachers, drama directors and other mentors. At Grammar we aim for boys to discover more about themselves, about the world, and about others within an environment of ‘exuberant purposefulness’. To discover what’s real and worthwhile, not just in the academic sphere but in as much else as we can throw at them. To understand difference, compassion, and how to exercise restraint. To learn how to work collaboratively towards a common goal: bringing to life a stage play, aiming for that elusive synchrony in a rowing crew, mastering a seemingly impossible piece of orchestral music, disciplining one’s thinking in a debate, cajoling an unwilling company of junior cadets in the field on camp. Joining the French Rap Club because…well, just because it sounds like fun. None of these things have quantifiable outcomes; all of them are a form of human playfulness, or to turn the previous phrase around, ‘exuberant purposelessness’. Because free play, subject to the whim, imagination and spontaneity of human interaction, as opposed to platform-organised play, is where the real joy in life is to be found.

But success in public examinations is no measure of genuine intellectual curiosity or engagement, or indeed emotional intelligence, and we should always resist the temptation to think in this way. One of the stated aims of the School, made explicit in its founding Act, is ‘for the promotion of a regular and liberal education’. By liberal education we mean empowering boys with broad knowledge and transferable skills, whilst also fostering critical thinking. Nurturing a life-long interest in ideas, a habit of reading and love of learning for its own sake.

At Grammar, we are also members of a much wider community, one in even greater need of the skills and talents which we have been given. And that is the world beyond College Street. If we are engaged in the pursuit of what is good and worthwhile, then it follows that we are equally committed to the formation of good men – good citizens, good spouses, good fathers. Servant-hearted men, willing to apply their gifts for the benefit of the world around them; humble men who wear their successes and accomplishments with modesty; civilized men who value things of the mind; men of sensitivity able to find beauty in the natural world, in art, literature, music, in sport, in the beauty of human relationships, of shared endeavour, and mutual responsibility.

His Excellency the Honourable Andrew Bell, Lieutenant-Governor of NSW AC (OS 1983)

Both Sydney University and this School were explicitly founded to ensure that Sydney’s fledgling colony would have an educated populace to forge its future in an enlightened and civilized way. Both institutions were predicated upon a belief in the importance and transformative power of education as a foundation of a society which was emerging from its brutal convict origins to an incipient democracy.

The 1854 statute that established Sydney Grammar spoke and indeed still speaks of, and I quote, “a public school with the aim of conferring on all classes and denominations ... without any distinction whatsoever the advantages of a regular and liberal course of education.”

Note two things about this: first, the emphasis on “all classes and denominations without any distinction whatsoever”, language which at once captures (concededly in the male-oriented ways of the time) notions of equality of opportunity and nondiscrimination, powerful values, both then and now, and never to be taken for granted.

I sincerely hope, and do not doubt, that you boys appreciate or will come to appreciate and respect the value of the education you receive at Grammar, the value of the relationships you forge, the discussions you have had and will continue to have with your mates and, not least on this day, the dedication of your wonderful cohort of masters and, through their example, the importance of finding a meaningful and satisfying vocation.

The values of intellectual curiosity, independent thinking and mutual respect and tolerance of different points of view of which I have spoken have never been as important as they are today in a world which is so different from when I sat in this wonderful Town Hall between 1978 and 1983, exactly where you boys are now sitting.

These are real challenges which will confront everyone in this room but perhaps especially the boys as they leave school and enter this brave new world. But they are and will be well equipped and we must remember that the world has faced great challenges before, as the World War I Honour Board in Big School and the War Memorial in Hyde Park solemnly remind us. We also know that great challenges can present large opportunities.