Houston Blog
My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
On Friday we welcomed about 600 grandparents and special friends of Awty’s Pre-school and Lower School students to our campus. From the school’s perspective it was immensely encouraging to experience the interest and enthusiasm shown by grandparents in their grandchildren’s education. Judging by the comments I received from many of the visiting grandparents, it was also an experience that our visitors treasured very deeply.
Because of the large numbers of people involved, the grandparents’ visits were organized in two groups. The first group (Lower School grandparents) was welcomed in The Globe at 8:00 am, where a hearty breakfast was provided before several opening speeches and some musical performances by our students. The second group (the Pre-School grandparents) was welcomed in the Globe at 9:30 am with a substantial morning tea, followed by welcome speeches and a very professional video clip showing the diverse range of daily activities enjoyed by our pre-school children.
During my welcome speech at the opening ceremony, I quoted from one of the books I find myself returning to quite often, Edward de Bono’s “Textbook of Wisdom”. The passage I quoted was one that I hoped our visiting grandparents might appreciate because it says how wise older people are, or at least can be. The extract I read went like this:
“As you get older, you know more. When you are older you have experienced more. You have learned more things. You have made more mistakes. You have had more time to talk to other people and learn from their experiences. More things have happened in your lifetime, both to you and to the world around. You have had longer to reflect on all these things. All this takes time. Perhaps ‘wisdom’ is simply a generous way of saying that there are some advantages to being old when there seem to be only disadvantages in most areas. (But) we begin to doubt this simple equating of wisdom with age when we find that some older people are not wise at all and some younger people are ‘wise beyond their years’.”
I then posed the (hopefully rhetorical) question - do you have to become old to become wise? I added that I didn’t think so, because if that were true, then there would be no real purpose in schools such as Awty - we could simply wait for all our children to become old and then they would be wise.
However, at Awty, we believe that wisdom can be taught, and that is an important part of why the school exists - to help our students grow in wisdom in a way that other schools often seem unable to do, and to help them form a set of values that will make in a difference in a world that desperately needs those ethics and values.
I noted, however, that to become wise, everyone must work at it, and therefore we do make significant demands on our students, just as indeed we make significant demands upon ourselves. I shared my belief that to become wise, children must learn discernment and skills of critical and creative thinking, and perhaps even more importantly, they need to know how to love, which is why we seek to form our students’ hearts as well as their minds. I concluded this section of my welcoming speech by quoting one of my own personal mantras: the heart of education is the education of the heart.
Following the welcoming ceremony in The Globe, both groups of grandparents accompanied their grandchildren to their respective classrooms before concluding their visit with a tour of the Primary School Science Exhibition in the PAAC. And just as I would have expected, our young students were brilliant hosts and wonderful ambassadors for their school.
I received many ‘thank you’ e-mails from visiting grandparents following Grandparents Day, of which the following is typical: “I would like to applaud and thank you for the marvelous event/celebration of Grandparents/Special Friends day. Awty International School continues to impress us. How appropriate Dr Codrington words ‘the heart of education is the education of the heart’; how true, how beautiful and refreshing that Awty is adapting such a philosophy. The world is in need for such approach.”
I cannot help but think, however, that if any gratitude is due, is we at Awty who should be thanking our visiting grandparents - the dignity, enthusiasm and appreciation that they showed on Friday were an example to all of us, and we were deeply honored that they chose to spend their time visiting our school.
Grandparents Day
Sunday, 29 April 2012
On Friday we welcomed about 600 grandparents to the Awty campus.