FROM THE PRINCIPAL

Thinking about our approach to learning.

Often in these pages we celebrate the accomplishments of our students and explain our programs. I am very pleased that we do. Camphora is a celebration of the students and staff of the College.

It is important also, however, to consider the educational philosophy that underpins the school. Since The Enlightenment there has been a gradual change occurring in Western societies in regard to how education is understood. I wish to highlight some aspects of this, and to indicate how we respond to it at PLC Sydney.

Here are some of the key points of change:

1. What might be called the Augustinian model of learning dates back to around 400 AD. Ancient societies were concerned with the question: ‘What is the good life?’ Aristotle, for example, believed that human beings were motivated by their idea of what was good. He asked his readers to ask themselves: ‘What is the good you think you are achieving?’

The Christian thinker Augustine wrote about properly ordering our loves as the means to the good life. As a Christian this meant first loving God, then his neighbour and then himself.

An education was therefore bent around the ideas of working out what is the good. What does Goodness mean? What is Beauty?

What is Truth?

Out of Athens and Jerusalem emanated the notion that the human being was ineliminably valuable and subject to bigger forces. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum says that goodness has a ‘fragility’ to it. We are humble in its pursuit.

2. The Enlightenment distanced the learner from the objects that she studies. With the advent of the scientific method came the notion that to know the truth one had to fully remove one’s own bias. Universal truths will not be learned through doctrines or by cultural practices or by listening to one’s intuition, but by dedicated observation of patterns and the scientific method. Thinkers like Jeremy Bentham wanted to act out their faith practically, helping their neighbour in real ways. continued next page 

Whilst the scientific method has given us many great benefits in areas ranging from communications to medicine to use of energy, it has also reoriented our imagination in regard to how we think we learn. The famous chemist Michael Polanyi wrote a powerful book called Personal Knowledge in which he argued that the scientist never really divorces herself from her object of study. He noticed the profound differences in how science was done in the Soviet block to how it was done in the West.

3. Simultaneously, European writers like Sartre and Heidegger had studied and taught Augustine, and his modern existentialist counterpart Soren Kierkegaard, intensely. They decided that the scientific method, with its distancing of subject and object, was not the best way to understand the universe. Heidegger championed phenomenology. This is the idea that the centre of truth is a person’s lived experience within the world.

Life is a series of phenomena which we experience. My experience may not match yours. My truth may not match yours.

Notice the shift.

Originally we have truth and goodness and beauty existing first and foremost externally in God and the universe. Our task is to ‘discover’ life, to grasp its reality. Next we separate ourselves from our lived experience in order to observe the universe and establish provable truths upon which we can all agree. More recently we have our own truths which are preeminent.

Alasdar MacItyre’s best known book is After Virtue. It tells the story of what life is like for citizens who have abandoned the idea that there is a real goodness outside of ourselves, a telos, a meaning for us. One might say that we live in a time where autonomous expressionism is queen.

‘Contemporary moral experience, as a consequence, has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us becomes engaged in modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme we have inherited.

‘Once we have understood this it is possible to understand also the key place that three other concepts have in the distinctively modern moral scheme, that of rights, that of protest, and that of unmasking.’

MacIntyre astutely notes that the contemporary way of understanding the universe has consequences. Instead of goodness and beauty and truth being our highest goods, our own personal power becomes the highest good. Thus, whether we are left of centre, promoting equity, or right of centre promoting freedom, we learn to ‘coerce’ each other. There is a growth in the idea that the right way to respond to life is to assert our rights, to protest, and to unmask the motives and actions of others. The problem is that others are doing that to us too.

We are not necessarily better than them because we too may operate on the basis of power. At PLC Sydney we think the word AND is important.

Of course life has power struggles in it. AND you or I could be motivated by our own power. AND, we do want to use science to determine what is. AND we also recognise that we find out about the universe through testimony and through reason and through examination of ideas. AND we do have intuitions. AND we can pray. We believe in agency and creativity. We do all we can to enable girls and young women to make choices and to be creative. Yet we don’t think that we are autonomous. There is a universe that is pushing back. We do have things that are personally true AND, yet, we recognise that there is a reality to confront. Life is about discovery AND construction.

Our Magazine Team

EDITOR

Mrs Renee Jones

COVER

Our girls celebrate PLC Sydney's 135 Year Anniversary at the Open Day and Fair. See page 8 for details. Photos courtesy of Maja Baska.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Paul Burgis, Ms Rowena Barnett, Mrs Jo Golotta-Maxwell, Amelia Lai, Zoe Guard, Rafaela Lee, Dr Sarah Golsby-Smith, Ms Jo Knight, Mr Andrew Paxton, Mrs Alison Lloyd, Mrs Nicole Southworth Rader, Ms Jen Gair, Ms Kristen Privett, Ms Renee Brown, Ms Lisa Tabuteau, Mrs Michelle Olsson, Jasmine Chee, Natalie Iacullo, Lynette Hawkey, Ms Ella Bates, Isabelle Ho Shon, Harriet Alder, Kiara Morishita-Lee, Ms Isabel Hayek,

Ms Lizi Simms, Ms Bronwyn Amy, Miss Jiye Kim, Mr Garry Barker, Mr Gerard Faure-Brac, Mrs Jo McGrouther, Sienna Özdemir.

Ex-Students' News: Mia Joseph, Mrs Kaye Browne, Ms Patsy Beckett, Marina Clark, Lesley Meldrum, Helen Humphries, Debby Cramer, Elizabeth Gregory, Ann McDonald. Thank you to all the ex-students and their families who contributed.