Editorial

"Titanic sunk — one Aberdonian feared drowned." Such reputedly was the headline of an Aberdeen newspaper after the catastrophe in 1912. Whether this headline was ever printed I have yet to discover, but it does have a certain credibility and confirms the insularity found in many countries. Britain has had to be an outward looking country to survive and yet, paradoxically, in the context of the international community we are often too pre-occupied with our own relatively petty problems. The Media has much to answer for in this respect. A staggeringly high proportion of the world's population lives either on or below subsistence level. We see appalling images of starvation crawl across our television screens and die in front of our eyes. And yet the Media gives such disasters a comparatively low news-rating. Certainly if five people die in a London train crash it commands more attention than the rising tide of famine and lingering death in the Horn of Africa.

We, in the western industrial democracies, are a small, affluent elite surrounded by a sea of world poverty. Too often the cries of the starving are ignored. Was the Chapel Collection of £55 from staff and pupils a realistic donation to the Kampuchean refugees dying in their hundreds each day from starvation ? And yet when our record is examined closely, as Richard Harding has done in his excellent chronological history of the School, it can be seen that if St. Peter's stands for anything, it is not insularity nor lack of commitment to the wider world. Generations of Old Peterites have made significant contributions in every walk of life.

This present generation will see more fundamental changes in their lives than any other. We are living in an age of "dissolving certainties", to borrow a phrase. It is for this reason that one of the major challenges facing education is not simply to produce exam success, but to make pupils more aware of the problems they will face not just as citizens of this country, but as part of the world community.