My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
As the photo above shows, I welcomed a very important young man to my office last week. My grandson Noah, who lives in Canberra (Australia) was visiting Houston (with his mother – my gorgeous daughter, Liesl), and Awty naturally featured highly in their list of “must-see” places. As Houston’s largest independent school and America’s largest international school, it seems that Awty is now a destination in its own right.
Whenever I welcome children to Awty (whether they are related to me or not), what I always read in their young faces is ‘potential’. Having realised over many years how effectively an individual can change the world, I am in awe of the potential for positive change that lies within the capabilities Awty’s 1,500 students today.
In that context, I was challenged this week as I reflected on the thoughts of one of the speakers who I heard had spoken at the annual TED conference a few weeks ago.
The title of the address that caught my attention when I saw it on the TED website was this: “Set high expectations for all students”. The speaker was the President of the University of Maryland, Freeman Hrabowski. To quote Hrabowski, “What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder (but) they go on to PhDs and faculty positions at top universities.”
To cut a long story short, as a result of his participation in the march, Hrabowski found himself in a Birmingham jail (yes, at the tender age of just 12 years old), wondering if he would ever amount to anything. As things turned out, Hrabowski’s future was shaped by his gifts, his gratitude, his drive and his faith – and his story was the focus of the TED talk.
Hrabowski outlined four strategies that he had found to be effective in raising student outcomes during his tenure at the University of Maryland:
1.Set high expectations.
2.Build a strong sense of collaboration and mutual support among the students.
3.Require teachers to demonstrate their original contributions to their subject area and/or to education in general on a regular basis (this is based on findings that show the most effective teachers are those who continue to make their own original academic contributions).
4.Establish the expectation that faculty will cater for the individual learning needs of every student, which means that teachers must be flexible and focus on the individual challenges faced by each student.
Hrabowski closed his address with a quote from Aristotle: “Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
Although I was impressed by what I heard of President Hrabowski’s address in general, I wonder whether I really agree with his support for Aristotle’s claim.
Yes, I guess I am questioning the authoritative wisdom of Aristotle when I say this!
“Choice, not chance, determines your destiny,” says Aristotle. However, the way I see it, both chance and choice are important, not least because chance often affects the choices we make.
If CHANCE had not led Freeman Hrabowski to hear Martin Luther King, I wonder whether he would have made the CHOICE to go to Birmingham at such a young age. In contrast to Aristotle’s perspective, Democritus of Abdera claimed that “Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance.”
To me, however, Democritus’ emphasis on chance is as great as a distortion as Aristotle’s emphasis on choice.
Having said that, there is some evidence to support Democritus’ perspective. I can see that for most people in the world, it is the chance of where you were born, under which regime, to which parents, and which school you attended (if, indeed, you had the opportunity to receive an education at a school at all) that determines (or, at the very least, heavily influences) your destiny.
Even the chance inherent in the timing of one’s birth affects destiny. Today’s children have been born in an era when most of the accumulated wisdom of the world is available to them almost instantly on the internet via a device they can carry in their pockets (which does make me wonder why so many people use this marvellous access to spend their time looking at photos of what their friends ate for their breakfast).
Back in the days when I was an undergraduate at university, the problem was not an over-abundance of information, but a scarcity, which is why I spent many hours reading books in large libraries. But at least I consider myself fortunate to have been born after the invention of the printing press, before which finding any written knowledge would have a difficult experience indeed.
Each of these information revolutions – writing, printing, internet – has widened access to information, democratising access to learning, transforming the learning experience for students in ways that would have been unthinkable to previous generations who, through sheer chance, were born in different eras. Five years ago, iPads did not exist – who can say what role they will be playing in education just five years from now. And of course, to reiterate my earlier point, the choices students make within the confines of the chances they have are pivotally important.
Most people would probably prefer to embrace Aristotle’s more extreme position when he claims “Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” It is more motivational, less fatalistic, and perhaps it also reflects the preference most people feel to control the situations in which they find themselves – in other words, most people like to think that they possess substantial (if not complete) free will.
Ah – the free will debate; one of the oldest philosophical debates. Do humans possess free will or not? Does free will even exist? I can feel a good discussion coming to my next Theory of Knowledge class. And to exploit the opportunities that arise because I now live in the epoch of the internet (even though I was born into a different era), I shall prepare myself by studying three alternative perspectives on the subject without leaving the comfort of my own home:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/
When my two-and-a-half year old grandson came to visit me in my office last week, how much free will was involved?
Did chance or choice play the greater role in his visit?
Could he have chosen to visit a different school?
Perhaps he could have done, but seriously – why would he?
Choice or chance
Sunday, 31 March 2013