JONATHAN MAY

Darya (‘33-’40): BGS School Assembly, 2050

I LEFT BGS a decade ago today. When I was first asked to present this BGS assembly it made me more than a bit emotional. The 30s was not a happy time for the world, but knowing what we stood for in those formative years has made us who we are today.

My parents always said it was time to leave when the first sea walls started going up. But as more and more went up around and inside Greater Europe, and grew between states all over the former USA, the more obvious it became that there was nowhere to run to.

The catastrophic climate changes of the 20s and early 30s had driven over two billion people onto the road in search of better lives. When “conscients” were invented in the late 20s we were hopeful they’d give us the answers to the world we’d broken – mending it with ever-smarter technology. But instead of using them for this, our governments started to rely on them to make ruthless decisions about people and resources. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that a “conscient” - built out only to the level of human consciousness and empathy - would suffer from all the human conditions that we did.

At BGS, we knew where we stood. We couldn’t stop the walls, and we never had a chance to reverse climate change – that ship sailed well before most of us were born. We were young but far from naïve: by the time we were ten most of us had droned far outside those walls, the experience so vivid we didn’t need the autorecord.

At BGS our inspirational teachers showed us that it was never too late for empathy or for education, and they also showed us how to create opportunity and purpose for those who happened to have been born outside those walls. Yes, they taught us Maths. But they also taught us about the philosophy of empathy, about conscious non-humans, about the value of education, and the purpose of global society. We joined them in their mission to educate everyone, whether inside or outside those walls – we recorded, streamed, messaged, and taught a generation, all whilst learning ourselves.

Our teachers taught us how to organise resistance and change from the inside and from the outside. We went out into the world to work on society, education, on “conscients”, on our systems of government, and to undo what we could of the past twenty years. When the first walls came down in 2044, I was proud to be there with many of the BGS family. And I welcome the next generation to help us rebuild.