Education of the heart
Education of the heart
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Hopefully the times are long gone when people equate ‘education’ with ‘narrow academic learning’. I think it is generally acknowledged these days that any educational process which claims to prepare students authentically for the dynamic world in which they will operate during the (hopefully many) decades after which they leave school must embrace far more than rote learning, memorisation and regurgitation of factoids.
I sometimes express this in what I hope is a succinct aphorism - the heart of education is the education of the heart.
By this, I mean that any worthwhile education must have a noble purpose, it must be based on strong ethical foundations, it must nurture a genuine love of learning that will be life-long, and it must truly address the deep human yearning for meaning and purpose.
One of the many great features of the IB Diploma is the way it seeks to expand education beyond the walls of the classroom. It does this in a number of ways, one of which is the pivotal importance it places on the CAS (Creativity, Action, Service) Program. No student can obtain an IB Diploma without satisfying the CAS requirements. As the IB’s own website claims. “For many IB students, creativity, action, service (CAS) is the heart of the Diploma Program. It provides a self-driven, fulfilling experience that helps students broaden their perspectives while often helping the community at large.”
At Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong, we call our CAS program the ‘quan cai program’, or, to use the original Chinese - 全才. Quan cai (全才) is not an easy term to translate from the Chinese, but in essence it means ‘the fully-formed person’, ‘the total all-rounder’, or perhaps ‘the renaissance man (person?)’.
I think of the quan cai program at LPCUWC as being like CAS on steroids. The reason I say this is that the IB specifies (or rather, until recently, specified) that students spend at least 150 over the two years of their IB program on CAS activities. At LPCUWC, our students spend FAR more time than this, and rather than engaging in the three ‘standard’ areas of creativity, action and service, we have also added campus support and global concerns.
Yesterday afternoon we held our inaugural CAS reflection afternoon at the College. Organised by our CAS Co-ordinator, Steve Reynolds, the students began by spending an hour and three-quarters in their tutor groups reflecting on each person’s individual experiences and discussing ways of improving the quan cai program next year. This was followed by a gathering of all the students in the canteen for an hour and a half of sharing and celebrating some of the most notable and worthy quan cai events and activities of the year. This was a sensational time of impressive live performances, video and power point presentations, and deeply moving speeches. It was a time of expressing gratitude, of sharing some profound emotions, and above all, sharing the fun, excitement and value of the year’s CAS experiences.
I have found over many years that the things students remember after they leave school are the things that amused them and the things that shaped them. This places a great responsibility upon the College to provide experiences that will form students’ character and equip them with memories that matter. Our classrooms shape the minds of our students, but it was evident from yesterday’s reflections that our CAS program plays a major role in moulding character.
Like many others at the College, I think that perhaps we may offer too many quan cai offerings for our size – we have offered our 256 IB students a range of 99 activities this year. And what a choice – Action, Sports, Kids (A.S.K.), Alumni Connect, Amazing Voyage, Amnesty International, Art for Non Artists, Art House, Athletics, AV Team, Badminton, Ballet Training, Basketball, Belly Dancing, Best Buddies, Birthday Happiness, Blueprint, Boys’ Football, Bridge Club, Business Club, Café, Caritas Tai Wai, Chess and Games, Chinese Cooking, Chinese Dance & Music, Chinese Debate, Chinese Orchestra, Choir, Circus, Coral Monitoring, Crossroads, Cultural Evenings, Dragon Dance, East Asian Games, Eclipse Dance Group, English Buddies, English Debate, English Tutorials, Environmental Sustainability Group, Field Hockey, Filming and Editing, First Aid, G-eneration X , Girls’ Basketball, Girls’ Football, Global Concerns Action Team (GCAT), Global Issues Forum (GIF), Golf, Greco-Roman Wrestling, Help for Domestic Helpers (HDH), Home for the Aged, Hong Kong Culture and Exploration, Hospital Service at Prince of Wales Hospital, Indoor Boys Football, Initiative for Peace (IFP), International and Current Affairs (ICA), KELY Support Office and KELY Support Programs, Kung Fu, Latin American Dance, Lee On, Lighting Crew, Lion Dance, LPC Netorial, LPC Outreach, LPC Souvenir, LPC Western Orchestra, Mai Po Ecosystem, Mandarin Tutorial, Math Buddies, Model United Nations (MUN), MOS Kids, Mothers Choice, Netball, Operation Smile, Peer Support (on campus), Peer Support at Yiu On, Photography and Photoshop (P&P), Pinehill Village, Playback, Poinsettia, Rock Climbing, Ronald McDonald House, Sino-Japanese Youth Conference, South Asian Dance, Spanish Buddies, Speech and Drama, Squash, Student Consultative Council (SCC), Surviving in Spanish, Swimming, TeenAiders, Tennis, Traffik Link, UWC Communication, Volleyball, Walking with a Purpose, Work Out!, Yearbook, and Y.E.S. (Youth Education Service) -whew!
One aspect of CAS that I believe the IB was correct to mandate from the very beginning was the notion that marks should not be awarded for completion of CAS. CAS has always been seen within the IB not as an area where some students can ‘do better’ than others, but rather as a non-academic area of giving and growing, or as I would say, educating the heart to “become quan cai”.
The fruits of our quan cai program at LPCUWC were very obvious to anyone who attended the sharing and celebration session in the canteen yesterday afternoon. I was humbled as I listed to the great stories conveyed by my students. And the wonderful thing is that the life-changing experiences gained through service to others are bound to remain vivid in our students’ psyche long after the Chemistry, the Economics, the Mathematics, and the other academic content, have been forgotten.
In that sense, quan cai is education for life in all its fullness - truly educating the heart.
The photo at the top of this blog shows students from the Global Concerns Action Team (GCAT). They were in a team of 12 students that I took to Guizhou to help build a new medical clinic in Chengzhong, a poor Miao nationality village in Majiang, which is an isolated rural county in China’s Guizhou County. The left photo (below) shows the clinic under construction at the time the GCAT students were helping. The right photo (below) shows the completed clinic, which is now making a significant impact on improving the health of local villagers in Chengzhong. Both photos can be clicked to enlarge.
CAS in action - students from my Global Concerns Action Team (GCAT) help to build a new medical clinic in Chengzhong village, Guizhou province, China.