My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
This week, we have taken the time to thank many of the school’s supporters who have worked for the school faithfully and sacrificially over the course of this year.
It was a privilege to share some facts with our guests on how the Annual Fund has helped to enhance our educational quality:
• More than $70,000 was spent on faculty professional development, including sending six Spanish teachers to the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages Conference in Philadelphia, and sending six Lower School teachers to the National Science Teachers’ Association Conference in San Antonio.
• The Annual Fund helped to re-vamp the students’ outdoor recreation area between the new Levant Foundation Building and the Old Cafeteria to create a more welcoming and pleasant mixing area for our Middle and Upper School students.
• We purchased ten iPads for the Primary School teachers, and more significantly, 44 new promethean interactive white boards for the new classrooms in the Levant Foundation Building and the Lower School.
On Tuesday at lunch time, the ‘thank yous’ were expressed in the opposite direction, as the parents of our Grade 12 IB students thanked the teachers of their children by preparing and presenting a spectacular internationally-themed lunch, complete with a dazzling array of desserts that grabbed my attention as soon as I walked into the room. Enjoyable and appreciated though it was, the lunch was also a sad reminder of how much we will miss our wonderful graduating students when they leave us in just a couple of weeks from now.
The various ‘thank you’ functions this week led me down an interesting pathway of contemplative thinking as I reflected on the nature of giving (both of time and material resources) and why it might be that parents, teachers and others could esteem education so highly that they would be prepared to give sacrificially (time and money) to advance its cause. Please let me share some of these thoughts with you...
As most people in the Awty community know, I lived and worked in Hong Kong for seven years before I moved to Houston. Hong Kong is now part of China once again, politically speaking – but culturally, it has always been part of China.
Chinese families will go heavily into debt to finance a good education for their children, because they see education as the most important investment they can make in the future.
They are right!
At my previous school, which was a senior high school, we received about ten times more applications each year than we had places available. But the competition for a good education started at a much younger age than that. There was competition for entry into the best pre-school kindergartens, because that was seen as a stepping stone to the best primary schools, which improved one’s chances to get into a better secondary school, which in turn helped a student to get into a better university, and so on. We had tiny children of our faculty in tears because they had “failed” their interview to get into a good kindergarten, and their parents were no less distraught! To a westerner, it might have seemed ‘over the top’, but in a competitive society, where education is seen as the best way to improve one’s position in society, it was all quite rational – perhaps sad, but totally rational.
Education IS the key to a better future, both for the individual and for any nation, and those countries that understand this are the ones that tend to score most highly in international testing – places like Singapore, Hong Kong, the coastal parts of China, South Korea, and interestingly, Finland. What they have in common is a focus on education, a will to resource it generously, and a commitment by students to go the extra mile and put study before entertainment.
The problem is that providing adequate resources demands sacrifice – the “S” word to which I alluded earlier!
Like the US, Australia has soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the thing that brings the huge crowd to a total silence is the moment when the list of names is read out of those young men who have been killed on active service during the previous year. “The ultimate sacrifice” we call it, because no sacrifice is greater than giving one’s own life.
The silence comes from a respect for sacrifice. Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice. Students don’t achieve great results without sacrificing their free time to study. Teachers don’t become brilliant without sacrificing time and effort to study, prepare and practice. And schools don’t become excellent without the sacrifices made to provide resources and support to help those students and teachers.
I teach my ToK students that with every right comes a responsibility. The right to life implies the responsibility not to kill. The right to property implies the responsibility not to steal.
And the right to a great education implies the responsibility to make sacrifices. It is a right, and a responsibility, that all of us share!
Sacrifice
Sunday, 19 May 2013