Building mental muscle 

A gym for strength of character 

Why do you do bench presses? 

The question, posed by Headmaster Tim Bowden to students on the lawns at Woollamia, comes out of left field and appears to have them scratching their heads. 

“The reason you do bench presses,” he continues, “is not because at some point in your life you’re going to be lying on your back with a heavy weight on your chest. That’s not going to happen. 

“The reason is to build your capability for situations in which that strength will help you.”

The penny seems to drop. Woollamia is a place for building mental muscle, for developing academic rigour and study habits that will benefit them for the rest of their lives. 

It is also, in a sense, a gymnasium to build strength of character. 

“You are learning about how to get on with one another, how to handle friction and disagreement, how to step into leadership and have a positive influence,” Mr Bowden tells the Year 9 students, who are spending a whole term at Trinity’s Field Studies Centre (FSC) on the NSW south coast. 

“These are all learning things. Your learning here has to transfer to the rest of life. 

“You have learned the skill of curiosity, how to do research; you have thought about the application between theory and research. This is stuff you will do for the rest of your life. 

“Whatever you do, whether you go on to university or not, you will need to be able to continue to learn. 

“Your time here is part of the transfer. You will continue do that in many different circumstances in as many years as God gives you.  

“I hope you look back without regrets, that you leaned into it and learned from it. If you do have regrets, accept that, but the key thing is you learn from it.”

Tim Knowles, Head of the FSC, said the campus provided the opportunity to build social skills. 

“Most of the boys don’t share a bedroom at home but here there are three, four, five or six to a room. They are forced to get along, to find ways to overcome differences, to see the person behind the mask that might be on. 

“They build strong relationships with their peers, and the staff. The staff are on their side, giving them encouragement to help them through their ups and downs. They are always checking in with them 24/7.” 

Students don’t have phones and their access to school-managed laptops is restricted to certain apps at certain times. 

There is a big upside in personal development.

“You do have access to your friends, for example, and to great food, to good sleep hygiene routines, to many outdoor activities, to a great library … many students re-engage with the reading habits they may have lost at the end of Year 6,” said Mr Knowles. 

“This is a key moment in their lives. They are supercharging life skills. During the Field Studies Program they can step out from some of the pressures bombarding them from society, such as social media and technology, spending significant time with their peers to learn, to grow, to find ways to play. 

“They are encouraged to reflect on who they are, where they are, and how they got there.” 

This article originally appeared in our June 2024 Edition of Trinity News which you can view on our online digital bookshelf.