Reflecting on our Father’s Day events across the past two weeks, I feel such gratitude for all the loving, supportive fathers and father figures in the lives of our Grammarians. The breakfast events across the school were well attended and show the strength of fatherly connections within our community. The impact that fathers have on their daughters’ self-esteem cannot be understated. Significant literature reviews have demonstrated that fathers “have the potential to empower their daughters and play a role in shaping daughters’ gendered beliefs, specifically when it comes to daughters’ confident engagement with themselves, romantic partners, and vocational and educational opportunities” (Corleis & Lesch)

The support of good men stands in contrast to content increasingly shared on social media from the ‘manosphere’, that area of the internet where social problems are blamed on women and gender equality. Earlier this term, senior students who attended the Gourlay talk engaged with Professor Thomas Roulet from the University of Cambridge on “The Power of Being Divisive: How being unethical has become a competitive strategy and what it means for sustainability.” As part of the conversation, students questioned the manosphere and the popularity of online gender-based hatred. Professor Roulet’s provocations about the antisocial implications of unethical online behaviour caused a great deal of discussion. The topic of the manosphere was also the focus of the most recent University of Melbourne Dean’s Lecture series, in a lecture given by Dean of Education, Professor Marek Tesar. Professor Tesar highlighted the worrying prevalence of attitudes which identify women’s empowerment as a threat to men, and which suggest violence and mistreatment of women as an appropriate response. Our challenge for all young people, male and female, is to resist such negative and polarising representations of gender, to call it out in practice, and to develop understandings of the complex issues that are the true cause of the social problems that are falsely blamed on gender equality.

We are looking forward to a busy final week of term and ‘holiday’ period. House music rehearsals are taking place across the Merton Hall campus, led by our talented senior students. The Middle Years STEM tour to Japan is preparing for departure, we have the Year 6 Exhibition of Learning, as well as Snowsports Dinner and Boarder’s Parents Cocktail Party. It truly is a week of events that showcase the breadth of opportunities at MGGS. Meanwhile, Senior Students are preparing for trial exams. The exams represent the culmination of the year’s learning and give students the chance to ‘show off’ how much they have learned. We wish every Grammarian taking part success and a confidence boost from the experience of the trials.

We look forward to welcoming teachers and students back to school on Monday 5 October, and we wish all of our families a safe and happy holiday period.

Lynda Wall
Deputy Principal