Happy New Year!

No, I’m not living six weeks in the past.  Sunday is Lunar New Year’s Day, or as it is often known, Chinese New Year.  So, before I say anything else, I wish you 恭喜发财.

This Sunday marks the end of the Year of the Dragon and the first day of the Year of the Snake.  Ever since the days of Genesis, snakes have had a poor image in the West, but in China this is emphatically not the case.  People born in the Year of the Snake are said to be thoughtful and wise, and to approach problems rationally and logically, seldom instinctively.  Such people are said to be complex beings, clever, and men of few words.  It is said that people born in the Year of the Snake are often too active, not believing other people and relying only on themselves.  Snake-people are also said to be very insightful and naturally intuitive.  I don’t want to make a big thing of this, but I was born in a previous Year of the Snake.  I also want to declare that I don’t believe personalities and abilities are determined by the year in which a person was born.

As most people probably know, I lived in China for seven years before moving to Houston.  Even now there are many things I miss – and without doubt, celebrating Chinese New Year is one of them.  It was therefore a huge thrill, honor and surprise when I was greeted on Monday afternoon by one of my Grade 9 students, Jessica Zhai, together with her mother and her uncle who was visiting from Shanghai, when they called into my office to present me with a Chinese New Year painting.  I was deeply touched by their

goodwill and generosity.

New Year paintings are an important part of the tradition of Chinese New Year.  Centuries ago, the new year paintings showed door gods, or historical and mythological scenes, usually in bright colors to help create a happy and prosperous atmosphere.  During the Cultural Revolution, the subjects of the paintings changed to show fervent farm workers, mechanised harvesters, exuberant factory workers, and so on.  These days, the emphasis tends to be on plump babies to symbolise happiness, prosperity and optimism for the future.

Chinese New Year is a wonderfully happy time for enjoying the company of friends and family, for eating well, and for making brave, optimistic plans for the coming year.  Even though I no longer live in China, I have still not broken the habit of taking time to ponder the future whenever Chinese New Year arrives.  And for me as an international educator, making plans for the coming year inevitably means engaging in some ‘big picture’ thinking – goals like building our common global future, surely one of the most important jobs anyone could have.

Maybe I am someone who sees patterns even when they are not there, but when I think about the future, two broad parallel themes keep recurring in my mind.  For want of better labels, I’ll call these two threads ‘roots’ and ‘wings’.

By ‘roots’, I mean the foundations that help steer a direction for the future, and the ways in which the past nourishes today’s experiences and attitudes, mostly for better, but occasionally in ways that cause anxiety.

By ‘wings’, I am referring to the freedom to look towards the future – to create an environment that is at the cutting edge of best practice, that gives young people freedom, and in so doing, gives the school the freedom to fly.

Roots and wings – to me, they seem good images that provide a framework for planning during the coming Year of the Snake.  When I worked in New Zealand, I came to appreciate a Maori saying: “You walk into the future looking backwards”, or as I might interpret it in this context, “Our wings spring from our roots”.

At the risk of mutilating an old cliché, I sometimes think that the world consists of two kinds of people, some who focus on roots, and others who focus on wings.  Speaking personally, I am primarily a ‘wings’ person, because wings represent the future, and the future both excites and fascinates me.  After all, if you are playing tennis, you need to run to where the ball is going to be, not to where it has already passed.

When most people make plans for the future, they usually begin by examining current problems.  This is what I call the problem-centered approach.  For example, most schools’ strategic plans that I have seen over the years in various parts of the world tend to accept existing trend projections and strategic pathways, and concentrate on innovating better ways to accomplish the same tasks that have been identified as today’s problems.

The problem with this approach is that doing old things better merely creates a future model of education that is less mediocre.  To construct a magnificent system requires developing a vision of what constitutes a magnificent system.  If anyone wants to create outstanding education, he or she must first imagine it.  Continuous improvement and marginal, incremental change, important as these are, are sometimes not enough.

It has been said that there are only a few people in the world who actually make things happen.  There are significantly more people who watch things happen, and then there is the bulk of humanity who ask, what happened ?  The way I see it, effective education shifts people, and especially students, into that first category – young men and women who make things happen, who can initiate positive change.  It is a simple goal, but as Leonardo da Vinci said, simplicity is the great sophistication. 

So, what is needed to create such a powerful learning environment?  First, I think a clear vision is needed with a central focus on student-centered education, because that is the key to helping students become change initiators.  If we focus on consequences such as exit credentials and the curriculum (important though these are) without reference to the imperative source – student-centered learning – then we run the risk of becoming rudderless.

Second, I think there needs to be a strong sense of idealism and purpose that infuses the ‘DNA’ of any school that aspires to earn the adjective ‘great’.  A key component of idealism and purpose in the 21st century must be ‘sustainability’, not only the environmental sustainability that I wrote about in last week’s blog, but other types of sustainability such as financial sustainability, institutional sustainability, and even personal sustainability.  Without sustainability in all its forms, we simply don’t have a future!

Third, I think a learning environment needs to be guided by a clear set of principles that articulates what we believe is ‘right’ for us to do as ethical, learning individuals.  In the context of an international school like Awty, this would include key facets of education such as developing global perspectives, international understanding, service learning, critical thinking, equipping students with the skills to discern reliable from unreliable information, truth from consensus, the various approaches to ethics, and so on.

If the aim of international education is to help build a truly better world, we need to be clear about the meaning of that goal.  I think I would define a better world as one that is based on mutual understanding, respect and shared values, one that is more open, more tolerant, more respectful, more deeply understanding of different perspectives, more peaceful, and where people are competent and informed to make important decisions.

As I was reflecting on this noble but ambitious ideal of building a better world through education, the obvious point struck me that this can only happen if everyone in the school community explicitly models both open-mindedness and open-heartedness.

By “open-mindedness”, I mean flexibility of mind, a willingness to consider, and even seek out, contrasting viewpoints and different ways of tackling a task.  It means truly embracing the concept of a consultative environment, but in a way that encourages listening and self-reflection, not advocating one’s own viewpoint to the exclusion of honestly considering others.  It means listening attentively and sympathetically and respectfully to others, entertaining new ideas, new points of view, new suggestions for thought and action.  It is an intellectual endeavour; it is based on data and evidence, and it accepts that there can be more than one way to achieve the same ends in different contexts.

On the other hand, “open-heartedness” embraces what I call “emotional receptivity”.  Unlike open-mindedness, which is an intellectual exercise, open-heartedness is a response of the emotions.  Together, these two complementary concepts of open-mindedness and open-heartedness should enable a school to work in a dynamic, respectful and focussed way as an authentic learning organisation to bring about effective change.

One of the great things that has struck me since I arrived in Houston to work at Awty is the passionate commitment people have to the school, and the way in which they yearn to be part of the decision-making processes that shape the school that they so clearly love.  This goodwill is a huge strength.  There are many schools in the world that crave for this fervent passion, and we have it in abundance.  The challenge is to ensure that this passion is embraced and nurtured in an atmosphere of both open-mindedness and open-heartedness.

No-one can predict with certainty the skills that will be needed when today’s students have been in the workforce for a few decades because we don’t know what occupations have yet to be invented.  How could we have predicted 30 years ago what many of the school’s graduates would be doing today, especially in jobs involving IT, nanotechnology, and so on?  What educators must do, therefore, is equip students with the creativity, the flexibility, the confidence and the competence to initiate change in original ways by bringing together insights from disparate fields.  We could label this constructivist education, and I cannot see how we can claim that we are equipping our students with future-proof skills without including this as a central part of our educational armoury.

The story is told of a man visiting Michelangelo in his studio as he worked with his chisel on a huge block of rough-hewn marble.  It was apparently an uninspiring sight, as the work was dusty, messy, and hard.  When the man asked Michelangelo what he was doing, he replied: “I’m releasing the angel imprisoned in this marble.”

Education is like that.  It is a profession that seeks to free people – to provide each individual with the care, the skills, the nurturing, the insights and the ethics to achieve their potential.  It means digging deeply into the block of marble to find the roots in order to unfold and release the angel’s wings.

Education is a process of enlightenment.  Education does not fill buckets; it lights fires.  Education can be distinguished from indoctrination because only education flourishes in an atmosphere that embraces both open-mindedness and open-heartedness. 

And that is how we build a better world.