A positive education for the future Jeremy House, Head of School at AMADEUS International School Vienna, Austria, looks at the international sector’s role in shaping education What is clear about the present, is that the rate of change is exponential. What that tells us about the future, is that to succeed, our students will require continual learning and adaptability. At AMADEUS International School, Vienna, we believe it is fair, and necessary, that what will be demanded of our young people can be expected of us. We must be innovators, action researchers, and ambassadors for bettering the practices and potential of a modern education. The international education sector has a great responsibility to lead the way in this respect. Of special importance to us given our small family oriented community, our Arts and Music Academy (AAMA), and our rich diversity (of more than 50 nationalities), are three developmental pillars which focus our efforts and create tremendous value to our students, teachers, families and wider community. These are 1) a positive education, 2) a creative education, and 3) an international education. Our Positive Education focuses the agenda on identifying, customising and embedding programs and practices which help young people learn to live
a full, happy, meaningful and healthy life; our Creative Education sets the agenda of leveraging the benefits of a Music and Arts inspired pedagogy and integrated curriculum for maximum growth; and, our International Education sets the agenda of truly capturing the value of cultural diversity for learning, for international mindedness, for personal growth, for global understanding and for communication and collaboration. Each pillar of an AMADEUS Education is enacted within our beautiful campus throughout the entire school. They permeate our thinking, our planning, our teaching and learning and our being. In what follows we introduce you to the first pillar, a Positive Education. ‘Institutions – governments, churches, industries, and the like – have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and in need of reconstruction.’ (C. H COOLEY, 1902)
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