St Paul’s Turns Silver
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
all images in this blog can be clicked to enlarge!
Like my other colleagues who are Heads of a United World College, I have enjoyed a diverse teaching career in several countries over many years. My first headship was at St Paul’s Grammar School in Penrith, an outer suburb of Sydney (Australia), where I served as Principal from 1989 to 1997.
Last Saturday evening I had the privilege of attending a dinner with several hundred other guests to celebrate the 25th anniversary of that school. I was the third Principal of St Paul’s, arriving when the school was just 6 years old with 530 students, a figure that had grown to 1250 (including my own four children) when I left in 1997. As the school where I served my 
first headship, St Paul’s will always have a special place in my heart, and its silver anniversary was an event I would not have missed for anything.
Di and I arrived at the school an hour and a half before the dinner began so we could take the time to walk around the grounds and soak up the atmosphere, taking in the substantial developments that have occurred over the past decade since my departure. In the late afternoon autumn sunlight, the grounds ![The four Principals of St Paul’s Grammar School: Adrian Lamrock (1983-86), Ruby Holland (1987-88), Stephen Codrington (1989-97) and John Collier (1998- ). [CLICK HERE to see large image]](18_St_Pauls_Turns_Silver_files/shapeimage_1.png)
looked wonderful and were a testimony to the continuing vision of the founders of the school, many of whom were present at the dinner on Saturday night. It was an evening when the term ‘talented eccentrics’ was used almost too liberally to describe the contributions of many of us who laboured together to establish and build upon the foundations of the great school that St Paul’s is today.
Rather than speeches, the dinner featured a series of ‘conversations’. I was interviewed by 
Adrian Lamrock, the first Principal of St Paul’s. In his introduction, Adrian was very generous in his comments regarding my contribution as Principal, describing it as a period of vision, energy, expansion and rigour. Adrian asked me three questions, focussing on the theme of internationalism as it affected St Paul’s. As a national rather than international school like the one where I work now, St Paul’s understandably falls short of the breadth and depth of internationalism I almost take for granted every day at Li Po Chun UWC – this is not in any way a criticism, but a statement of inevitable reality. Nonetheless, St Paul’s is now a lighthouse of internationalism in western Sydney, with extensive and flourishing links with China, Canada, Tanzania and Congo as well being almost unique in Australia in offering all three IB programs of study.
Here follows a transcript of Adrian’s questions to me on internationalism, together with my responses:
1. Why did you decide that internationalism is/was important?
I didn’t decide internationalism was important. I simply recognised it.
2.How did you decide on what you decided on in internationalism for St Paul’s?
I wanted to make global awareness so fundamental to our identity and our practice that no-one was really aware of it – it would just seem normal. Introducing the IB worked well in achieving 
that, although it was only one part of the reason we introduced the IB, and it took a long while for it to become the central learning framework that it is today, right through from Kindergarten to Year 12. When I was here, I unfortunately never expressed it as clearly as the author Thomas Friedman did; he wrote the book The World is Flat and he said that what the world needs is people who ‘combine a business school brain with a social worker’s heart’. I really like that!
The other aspect of internationalism I pushed was the links with China. This seemed to me like a visible, practical expression of internationalism. It showed through the teaching of Chinese language (because the best way to understand someone else’s thinking is to know their thought patterns), and establishing the links with schools in China that in turn enabled student and staff exchanges to take place, and so on.
It also showed in our opening of a branch school in Harbin in 1996. That was part of an ambitious plan to open several schools in China, but sadly the momentum faltered a bit later and others have now stepped in to fill that niche. But the Harbin school did show that St Paul’s was prepared to ‘walk the talk’ when it came to internationalism!
3.Why China?
The decision to emphasise China was a probably product of the times – and to be honest, my own long-term interest and passion. You need to remember that all this was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s when communism in Europe was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was falling, the Soviet Union was disintegrating, and so on. China was opening its doors after a 
period of isolationism and an extreme model of socialism, it was the most populous country in our region, an emerging economic superpower, and it had a rich cultural tradition. I thought China might be ready for St Paul’s!
I remember speaking to a parents’ meeting in 1992 when we had just decided that Chinese would be the compulsory language in the new primary section we were about to open. Some parents thought we should be teaching Japanese because of the stronger business links Australia had with Japan at the time. I remember commenting that EVEN IF business links were the reason you learnt a language (and I didn’t accept that for a moment), but even if they were, then if you wanted the relevant language for the previous quarter century, you would choose Japanese. If you wanted the relevant language for the NEXT 25 years, you would choose Chinese. And I think that has been shown to be correct.
But having said that, if I were in the same position today, I think I would be looking elsewhere, probably to somewhere like Iran or North Korea to build initiatives. Please don’t misunderstand me – I think China is still tremendously important. For five days earlier this week I was in China 
to support a project my students are involved with in co-operation with the Amity Foundation to build 100 medical clinics in poor, rural parts of Guizhou province. For four years I have taken a group of students to do a week’s voluntary service work in a lepers’ village in Yunnan province. China is certainly very significant and it will be for many years, but our thinking should always be to move forward. North Korea is opening up, and when it does so fully, it will be those groups that have already established a presence there that have the most influence. Islam has replaced communism as the great ideological challenge for countries such as Australia, and it is in seriously Muslim countries such as Iran that I would be shifting my thinking today.
But can I also say: being globally aware is more than just building school-to-school links, especially if those links are with fairly affluent schools in Chinese cities. After all, most Chinese people still live in the countryside where conditions are poorer and the needs are immeasurably greater! The IB and every sacred text including the Bible have something in common that is very powerful and very important – they call on us to be compassionate. Compassion does not mean feeling sorry for someone else’s situation; it means doing something about it.
That’s the challenge we all have before us today if we are going to take the concept of authentic internationalism seriously.
‘The Centre’ was the last of many buildings constructed during my period as Principal of St Paul’s Grammar School
