A special day for Oscar who joined the “Sweet Sixteen” club today.

We wish him the best and lots of joy in his life.

Feliz cumpleaños, muchacho 🙂

The quickest and easiest way of not being cyberbullied 🙂

Our weekly discussion went around the topic of the “pressure” of having followers on our social networks.

Let’s face it, we all love to have lots of followers/friends online. We feel special, cherished and unique and it’s becoming a source of satisfaction to those who engage in social media. If you have no followers you don’t exist… the more you have the “cooler” you are… even if you don’t know them.

If we think of celebrities, it is considered to be normal they are followed by millions of people. They tend to be artists, sportsman or icons in their areas of action. They represent “per se” a role model, success and achievement even if some of these concepts are blurry and debatable.

However, for the “mortal” that we are, we search to get this virtual recognition by following and being followed and this is where the void question comes in: what do we really get from this?

We all understand that this does not represent much, or nothing at all, other than in this fake virtual world. The fact is that most of the people that follow us, we not even aware of them individually and we would never notice if they decided to unfollow us.

It’s a number, a figure on our counter… and some of them are even fake and hide mischievous intentions underneath.

But we live with present times and social networks are a great source of communication, which can link people sometimes and allow bonding… In the end, it’s like outside, one just needs to be careful and not trust strangers 😉

One of the things we are more proud of is the sense of cooperation and spirit of support we get to see growing in our students.

Our Kotaro is an example of team-work and an important source of support to Yuto, one of the Junior students in our Boarding Community.

Every week they spend time together. They bond, they talk, Kotaro helps Yuto with his work and Yuto is doing better academically thanks to this.

It goes without saying that we are extremely proud of both of them for the values shared and the sense of support and companionship they represent.

This could be the resumé of our Wellbeing session today.

Our Pillar 4 is dedicated to online safety.

The virtual world is a permanent presence in our lives and the young generations, which were born in this era, see this as something totally natural and spontaneous.

However like many other things in life, there are risks, depending on how we use it, deal with it and manipulate it.

Our conversation was triggered that people should be free to post whatever they want without being judged. However, quickly we understood that assumption was not fully accurate and above all, the reality is that the world online is more open than an open book. The facts are once we post something online, we are no longer owners of what we post. It belongs to that platform and it might stay visible, like an art masterpiece in a museum, for all who want to see.

Having said this, there are legal regulations about the contents shared online and these can be quite strict and bear important consequences. And the trick is that these change from country to country – which is something to have in mind. The boys seemed to be somehow familiar with the legal frame in their home countries: but when it comes to Switzerland, for instance…

The aim is not to scare but raise awareness that these topics are quite sensitive and one needs to be fully careful with what manipulations go online. The facts is that it can jeopardize our future, a university application, a job interview…

As an example we asked the students to Google themselves and some were surprised to see images of them, publicly visible, when they weren’t even aware of it.

A very delicate subject, that we were all somehow familiar with, which deserves our deepest reflection as quite often, we seem to dismiss the potential consequences…