Paradoxes of Adolescence
Paradoxes of Adolescence
Perhaps selfishly, I thought I would upload a picture of my home, which is on the campus of Li Po Chun United World College, for this week’s blog. I did this because I have seen so little of it this week, and so seeing it on my own website might provide me with a virtual reminder of what it looks like during daylight!
I guess every week is busy when you are Principal of a school, especially one as dynamic and stimulating as LPC! But this week has been particularly busy, and next week looks as though it will be quite similar. Three factors have contrived to create the busy-ness - all of them enjoyable, none of which I would want to forgo, but all of which have been time-consuming.
First, the students’ extended essays have to be sent away for external assessment next week. I am supervising five students’ Extended Essays in Geography on such diverse topics as the forced migration of Nubians in Egypt, the mobility of disabled people in Hong Kong, the liveability of different rural villages in Bolivia, the quality of life of Hispanic migrants into south-west USA and access to public infrastructure in Hamburg (Germany). As always, I find that I learn new things and gain fresh insights from my students - but they do tend to work right up to deadlines here, which creates huge pressures for the final checking and evaluation. Those pressures are focussing right now!
The second factor contributing to the busy-ness is Project Week, which starts next week. Every March, we suspend all classes for a week so that our students can do low-cost service work in various parts of south-east Asia. I will be taking a group of students to Phnom Penh in Cambodia to work in two orphanages. I am really looking forward to it, but the level of organisation is high when you are responsible for students from many different countries, and making sure that the arrangements are in place is time consuming. I had my first meeting with the students on Thursday evening, and after we allocated the work in the orphanages into three student-led teams (sports and games, arts and crafts, and singing and dancing), we shared the sobering experience of watching John Pilger’s classic documentary “Cambodia Year Zero”. Produced just a few months after the Vietnamese forced the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, it was the means by which the world learned for the first time about the genocide in Cambodia. I was not the only one with tears in my eyes as we watched the documentary!
The third factor has been the most time-consuming of all, however. As a follow-up to Challenge Day, which I wrote about in my blog a couple of weeks ago, the final round of the selection process for Hong Kong students to enter United World Colleges in September 2007 has now begun. Following Challenge Day, 120 students have been short-listed to be interviewed by the selection panel appointed by the Home Affairs Bureau. As Secretary of that Committee, I have the honour of sitting in on every interview. Four days this week were spent interviewing the first group of 60, and four next week will be devoted to interviewing the remaining 60. Each day, the interviews commence at 9:00 am (or at 11:15 on the days when I teach my morning ToK classes), and finish at some time between 6:30 pm and 7:30 pm. They are long days, but perhaps one of the most stimulating and invigorating parts of my job!
The students we have been interviewing are simply amazing - I have never previously encountered such talented, motivated, idealistic, passionate, principled, bright, articulate young men and women as I encounter in Hong Kong each year during these interviews. Their maturity, insights and wisdom are far beyond their tender years, and are little short of awe-inspiring.
In other places I have worked, I have noted that adolescence is usually a time of resistance to the challenges of principled ethics. This is usually not so in United World Colleges, nor is it evident in the young applicants from Hong Kong that we are interviewing. Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund, made these comments (admittedly, speaking mainly about boys)....
“I take it that it’s normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable time in an inconsistent and an unpredictable manner. To fight his impulses and yet accept them; to fight them off successfully and to be over-run with them. To love his parents and yet to hate them; to revolt against them and yet to be dependent on them. To be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart to heart talks with her. To thrive on the imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity. To be more artistic, idealistic, generous and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite; more self-centred, egotistic and calculating.”
It is sad that the media (my constant target of criticism!) often cheapens itself by labelling youth as undisciplined and reckless, because my experience here in Hong Kong has always been just the opposite. If there is a problem, then it is perhaps the cheapening, corrupting, materialistic influence of the media itself as it portrays value systems to young people that are anything but principled and idealistic!
As an educator, I think there can be no more wonderful challenge than to share insights and guidance to young people who are starting their own journeys into adulthood. To be involved with young people in their search for meaning is the greatest of privileges.
Sunday, 4 March 2007