Murdoch Centre
for Educational Research and Innovation
Service
‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ John Donne (1623), Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII Service implies a wider view of the world. A narrow view is one confined to our own circle, centred on ourselves; as we grow, we realise as John Donne did that nobody lives in a world of their own apart from the rest of society, but we are part of a living, changing whole. Donne used a geographic metaphor, but we might use a biological one; we are like the cells in a body; if a part of the body becomes sick, then we will all suffer. Service is our way of ensuring the health of the whole body.
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In schools we see service in so many guises: teachers who are dedicated to their students and colleagues, who give up their own time to help others (nowhere better illustrated than in the lives of our dear friends Mark Williams and Gordon Wilson); students who readily give their time and effort in the service of their fellow students, for the community, as we can see in these pages. But we also see examples of self-centredness, where individuals often cannot see beyond themselves. Sometimes in the school service has to be mandated, as the parents of any teenager who has had to be dragged out of bed to help out in the school’s Red Shield Calling programme can attest. Why is this so? Why do some embrace service while others do not? For many years the failing was seen as largely a moral one: a person did not have the moral fibre to overcome their innate selfishness. However, as advances in science have allowed us greater insight into how the brain works, we have discovered that there is often a biological reason for some of these behaviours. The game-changer was the development of the fMRI. A MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) – that giant medical machine where a patient lies down while a scanner circles them – measures, among other things, blood flow. In the brain, increases in blood flow is a sign of greater activity in a particular part of the brain, so scientists can identify what parts of the brain are being used. With the fMRI, that ability is taken one step further: a person’s brain can be studied while they are doing an activity (that’s the f in fMRI: functional). This means that researchers can look inside a person’s brain while they are thinking through a particular problem or completing a certain task and see the changes, the ebbs and flows, as they perform a task or think through a type of problem. Now with much greater accuracy, we can identify the areas of the brain responsible for particular emotions, attitudes and developmental stages.
