People and places
Why being the ‘difference makers’ still matters Peter Howe celebrates a vintage year at UWC Atlantic
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late high school education was seen as the starting point. This approach was based on the prescient ideas of German educationalist Kurt Hahn who believed that the promise of youth – regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or citizenship – was underestimated and that two basic insights must be imparted to students: (1) you are needed, and (2) you are able to achieve more than others think and than you believe yourself. He felt that if young people could be convinced of this, and live it through their experience of education, then the future was bright. As Kurt Hahn said in a speech a few years before his death at the age of 88, “I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an indefatigable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial and, above all, compassion”. From the radical beginnings of The Autumn |
Spring
2019 marks a number of milestones in the storied history of UWC Atlantic. The College saw the 55th leavers’ group, and the 50th to be graduating as members of the United World College (UWC) movement, founded in 1967 under the Presidency of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of women graduating from the College. So if ever there was a vintage year, this would be the one. It is easy to forget the incredibly bold venture that marked the foundation of the College. Established at the height of the Cold War, The Atlantic College, as it was originally known, was imagined as a place where education could serve as the bridge to connect east and west, the ‘difference makers’ who could transcend the nationalism and militarism that was dividing the world. The world needed a rethink, and
| 2019
