Awty now has a sister school in China! I have spent most of the past week in Shanghai finalizing details of this new relationship between Awty and one of China’s top schools, Datong High School.
The agreement is the culmination of a long process that began just over a year ago when our Chinese language teachers asked me if I knew of any good schools (i.e. Awty-quality schools) in China with whom we might be able to
initiate student exchanges. I immediately thought of Datong High School, a key selective school in Shanghai’s Nanshi District that I have maintained contact with since my first visit there in December 1991 (see photo to the left). A long process of communications began which finally culminated in this week’s visit.
Twenty-one years ago when I first visited Datong High School, Shanghai was a very different place from the dynamic, international, prosperous city that it is today. The Cultural Revolution was still a recent and poignant memory in
most people’s minds, and just two years had passed since the Tian An Men Square “incident” in Beijing. The construction of today’s forest of high rise buildings had only just begun, there were no freeways or subway lines, and the new city of Pudong on the east bank of the Huangpu River was still nothing more than vegetable farms and a few villages. Today, Shanghai is China’s largest and most prosperous city, with a population of almost 20 million people.
Even back in 1991, Datong High School was one of China’s most highly regarded high schools. It had produced people of influence in all spheres of society, from the bulk of the ruling elite of the city’s politburo through to many of the reformers leading China’s then-new economic changes. It was established in November 1912, the same week of the same year in which Mrs
Awty was born, Until the early 2000s, the school was housed in colonial style grey brick buildings with distinctive rows of horizontal red bricks. Well known for its academic standards, its music and its sports, Datong boasted one of the few full size ovals in land-scarce Shanghai.
Although it was more than two decades ago, I can still remember the day that I first met with senior staff from Datong High School to discuss establishing a sister school relationship with the school where I was Principal at the time, St Paul’s Grammar School in Sydney, Australia. It was on the evening of 19th December 1991 when I met with Principal Chen Desheng and three of his colleagues in my room at the Peace Hotel. This was back in the days when establishing links with foreign schools was a brave, pioneering act in China, so I was deeply impressed when Principal Chen Desheng invited me to visit Datong High School the next day so that, to use his words which he spoke in always excellent English, we could “cement the relationship so that I could achieve my dream”.
Frankly, and in hindsight, I think my dream and the dream of the leaders of Datong High School were the same back then in 1991 – we shared a common hope to build bridges of deep understanding between students from different cultures so that the future of our world could be brighter for young people everywhere. It is the same dream that led me to Shanghai this week, the hope that Awty’s students can also benefit from the first-hand experience of mixing with students of the same age from China, the world’s most populous country and the world’s fastest growing economy. Even in today’s globalized society, such international links are still surprisingly rare – back in 1991, establishing a relationship with an overseas was ground-breaking, and in the case of China, quite radical!
The reason for the timing of my visit this week was that Datong High School was celebrating its centenary, and I had been invited as a guest of honor (a “lao pengyou” or ‘old friend’) to join the anniversary celebrations. I used the opportunity of the
invitation to discuss establishing the sister school relationship with the recently appointed Principal, Mrs Sheng Yaping. Before starting our discussions, however, I respected the Chinese custom of presenting a gift on behalf of The Awty International School to honor Datong High School on its 100th birthday. Our gift was a commemorative construction helmet in the school’s colors of green and gold, symbolizing both the recent construction of our new buildings at Awty and the start of the construction of a new sister school relationship between Awty and Datong. Principal Sheng was delighted to receive our gift with her predecessor, Mr Yang Minghua. Ms Sheng was impressed by the symbolism, and especially interested to learn that Mrs Awty was born in the same week that Datong High School was established, perhaps cementing our relationship as being one between “twin sisters”.
The Agreement was signed by the two Heads of School on a boat in the Huangpu River on the evening of Sunday 18th November, the day that Datong High School held its major centenary celebration in the school’s auditorium. Some photos of that great day are shown at the end of this blog (the photos immediately below show the signing ceremony on the boat with Ms Sheng Yaping).
Although this week’s agreement comes after a year of preliminary negotiations, it is really just the beginning of opening the door to some great new opportunities for Awty students to experience China first-hand, to welcome students from Datong High School into their own homes, and to develop friendships with young people in what is probably the most dynamic region of the world today. I hope that in the years and decades to come, students in both schools – in Houston and in Shanghai – will become even more enlightened, better informed and more globally aware as a result of the “centennial twin-sister school agreement” that was finalized in the week that both Mrs Awty and Datong turned 100.
Shanghai has changed a lot since 1991, and if you are interested, I have included a link HERE or at https://stephencodrington.com/Galleries/Shanghai.html to a three-part gallery of images that I have taken in Shanghai on several visits, from my first visit there in 1982 through to contemporary photos that I took just a couple of years ago. (Unfortunately I had no free time during this week’s visit to get any new photos to update the gallery, but the general trend can be summarized as – there are now even more buildings, more advertising, more wealth and lots more cars!).
