The Graduation Dinner
The Graduation Dinner
Sunday, 18 April 2010
On Friday evening we celebrated the end of classes for our final year students with a graduation dinner at the Novotel CityGate Hotel in Tung Chung. This was the first time that we have held the graduation dinner as soon as classes have finished rather than waiting until the conclusion of the final IB examination. The change seemed to be extremely successful – it was a sensational evening in every way - and will serve to separate the graduation dinner from the formal graduation ceremony and end-of-term dinner in late May, thus enabling our students to have a longer and more reflective period of finishing their time at the College.
During my speech, I referred back to the hot, humid afternoons in early September 2008 when Di and I had welcomed these same then-new students to the College over drinks in our home. When I welcomed the students, I had given them three challenges for the two years that lay ahead of them (as I mentioned in my weekly blog at the time). These were:
1.Get enough sleep.
2.Be aware of the consequences of your ‘small’ everyday choices, because wrong choices can quickly erode the idealism and the integrity that were important reasons for your selection to attend a United World College; and
3.Fulfil the hopes that others have placed in you. At the time I mentioned how the cost of educating one student for two years at a UWC is about the same as the cost of building a small primary school in an East African country such as Tanzania or Zambia, and that the reason people donate the funds necessary for scholarships to attend UWCs is that they believe one person attending a UWC has more potential to make the world a better place than building a small primary school in East Africa.
I was delighted that all the students on Friday evening immediately remembered the first challenge about the need for sleep – although that may have been because many of them regretted not taking the challenge seriously enough at first. That old UWC adage still seems to apply for many students – “There are three S’s - study, socialising and sleep - and you only have time for two of them!”.
During my graduation speech on Friday evening, I updated the statistic on East African primary schools. I described how I had recently learned about a program called ‘United World Schools’, which has a project called “50 for 50”. It is aiming to build 50 basic primary schools in Cambodia and nearby countries before the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the first United World College, which will be in 2012. The project has been started by a British graduate of the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, Chris Howarth. Each primary school that Chris and his team is building costs about one year’s tuition for one student at Li Po Chun United World College.
Thus, the two year education for each of the graduating students on Friday evening represented the equivalent of two Cambodian United World Schools, not just one East African primary school. This can be expressed in a different way – the students in the room on Friday evening were the resource equivalent of almost 250 Cambodian primary schools.
I hope my graduating students understand and remember the significance of the immense challenge represented by that single simple statistic in the years and decades ahead.
The “50 for 50” program is just one way in which one United World College graduate is giving back to the Movement and helping to make the world a better place. The question and the challenge for my graduating students was (and is) – what will be their contribution in the years to come?
Speaking to the graduating students at Friday evening’s graduation dinner at the Novotel Citygate Hotel in Tung Chung.