"To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." St John Henry Newman wrote those words in the nineteenth century. Newman was an English convert, an Anglican priest and Oxford scholar who, after years of study and struggle, entered the Catholic Church and became a cardinal. What he gave the Church was a way of holding faith and change together: his great insight was that a living tradition, like the human person, does not stay the same by refusing to grow, but proves itself alive by developing, deepening, and maturing without losing its identity. A tree that stops producing new branches has not achieved perfection. It has stopped living. It is a reminder that growth and even the discomfort of change are not detours from a well-lived life. They are its shape and purpose.
This insight sits at the heart of the whole learning journey at St Mary's, captured in our 3 Stages of Learning. In Years 7 and 8, the work is Belonging. In Years 9 and 10, it becomes Broadening Horizons, widening a student's view of themselves and the world, and trying what they might never have chosen alone. In Years 11 and 12, it becomes Becoming, as students draw together what they have discovered and step into who they are going to be.
Subject selection sits at the hinge of that journey, in Broadening Horizons, and it deserves more than a logistical glance at prerequisites. It is a moment of discernment: not simply what will you study, but what are your gifts inviting you to become, and are you willing to embrace change in order to become this? The Catholic intellectual tradition has never treated the mind as a tool for mere efficiency and a Catholic education inherits that posture: a person is more than a resume, and to study anything seriously is to marvel at creation and try to understand it. Subject selection, rightly seen, is an invitation into that wonder turned toward a young person's own life. We live in a world changing faster than any generation before us has known. It would be tempting to treat subject selection as pure strategy, choosing whatever seems safest or most employable. But an education that only chases a moving target will always be a step behind. What does not change is the nature of the human person, and the deeper call to know oneself, love well, and use one's gifts for others. Newman would say a person who refuses ever to change has not simply stayed faithful to themselves. They have stopped “becoming”.
Three things are worth holding onto. First, honesty about strengths, looking again at where real ability and enjoyment overlap, rather than settling for an old story about oneself. Second, a willingness to try the unfamiliar, since growth rarely comes from staying inside what is already proven, but from stepping deliberately toward it. Third, patience with difficulty, since character, like understanding, is built through resistance, not around it. An unexpected subject may lead to an unexpected struggle, and that struggle may lead somewhere a student could not have planned alone. This is not a flaw in the process. It is how growth and vocation usually arrive.
And the pattern does not end at graduation. Belonging, Broadening Horizons, and Becoming are the shape of a whole life, repeated again and again, in every new job, community, or season that asks a person to belong somewhere new, broaden beyond what they know, and become someone slightly more than who they think they are. Newman's own life moved through repeated, often painful changes of belief and vocation, and it was precisely his willingness to keep changing that he came to see as the truest sign of a soul still growing toward God. If students leave this term asking not only what will get them somewhere, but who they are becoming, subject selection will have been an exercise of efficiency, as well as purpose and meaning.