COM M E MOR AT ION
The Head Master’s Address We live in a remarkable world of scientific, medical and technological advances where humans go faster, higher and stronger than ever before. Most of us carry in our pockets a device with greater capacity than the technology which first put humans on the moon fifty years ago this month. I don’t think I am that old, or perhaps I just don’t want to think that I am old, but in 1996 when I began teaching I had no mobile phone, no email address and in my classroom I had a blackboard and chalk. In 1992 the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an article called The End of History in which he asserted that following the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, humanity was reaching “the end of history. That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukuyama’s claim is now considered alongside other famously inaccurate predictions such as the president of IBM saying in 1943 that he considered there might be “a world market for maybe five computers” or Time magazine’s confident assertion in 1966 that “remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop”. Indeed deep questions have been raised as to whether liberal democracy is even working in the West as we look at the state of politics in the US, the great schism caused by the 2016 EU referendum and a process whereby 330 MPs and approximately 160,000 members of the Conservative party will elect our next Prime Minister.
So if advances and events of recent years have shown us that futurology is an imprecise art, what does this mean for education and what does it mean for us at St Peter’s? For a school as old as ours it could be that, as the old musical says, like “old man river” St Peter’s just keeps rolling on. There is of course some truth to that but St Peter’s has never simply just kept rolling on. Over the centuries, the school has changed, evolved and adapted to the growing needs of a changing world but there remains a thread of continuity that, like a rich seam of gold, runs through time. Education has never just been about the imparting of knowledge or the giving of information from one person to another. This can be seen in the roots of the very word education where the Latin ‘educere’ means a drawing out not a putting in. It is true that we cannot know the future for which we are preparing children but when can that have ever honestly been said? What is certain is that great opportunities will exist for those who are prepared to take them.
“Over the centuries, the school has changed, evolved and adapted to the growing needs of a changing world.” As life is very complicated sometimes it is better to distil it into simple ideas and a key concept is that we are not producing 18-yearolds but rather thinking ahead to the young people sitting in the Minster today as successful adults in their middle and late ages. If we start from that premise and consider what makes somebody happy, confident, successful and fulfilled later in life we know that it requires a wide range of skills, interests and values. We also know that it starts with examination results especially in our qualification driven society where attaining the best grades possible is a crucial link to the next stage in life after school.
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The Peterite 2018–2019
