History & Ethos

When Alfred Edward Le Peton, the founder of Sandford Park School, welcomed the first students to his new academy in Ranelagh on the twelfth day of September, 1922, had he any real sense of the import of the moment? The truth of the matter is that he almost certainly had not. Kierkegaard tells us that although lives must be lived forwards, they can only be understood backwards, and as it is for people so too is it for institutions. Le Peton might have prayed, might have hoped but he could not have known that his latest venture would prove to be a success, could not have comprehended the full and longterm significance of his fresh undertaking. He did know, however, that he was taking a very big chance. A new Ireland was in the process of being born, much of the world was still in turmoil after the Great War, the tides of time were ebbing and flowing quickly and unpredictably, and it was upon such a sea, heaving and tempestuous, that he had decided to set his new educational flagship afloat.  

In 2023, a history written for the centenary of the school was painstakingly assembled, the authors logging the voyages of Sandford. More than this, they provided the readers with an inventory of the cultural materials of which the School was constructed and with an analysis of the shared ethos which held all its constituent parts together, that spirit of ‘fraternité’ which yet binds us one to another, that philosophy which, every day, prompts us still to strike out anew for ever more golden horizons while grasping for the future and ‘arduus ad solem’, striving for the sun.  

Orders for "Arduus Ad Solem: A History of Sandford Park School" can be made here.