Senior School

A good education, a good life, a good society

Natalie Charles Head of Senior School

Having a conversation with Helen Penrose, who is in the process of writing Carey’s history for our centenary in 2023, is to take a stroll through the hallowed halls of some of Australia’s most influential independent schools. She explains the special but at times vexed place schools occupy in the hearts and minds of neighbourhoods and nations, which she has learnt through her research into many schools. Indeed, it’s an intriguing experience to hear the historian speak first-hand of the myriad forces that help build schools such as ours and to learn of the enduring issues that have underpinned the educational offering in Australia for nearly two centuries. And all the perennials are present and accountable – from negotiating funding to attracting and retaining quality staff. But of course, schools are not immune to the sociopolitical and historical forces which surround and shape them either, as the biography of Gerard Cramer, Yours Sincerely, G. L. Cramer, makes clear. Recalling some particularly radical and socially turbulent years, it claims he began ‘to realise that he had become headmaster at perhaps the worst time possible. The decade 1965–1975 was a trying period for all those who had to do with schools. Freedoms had come too fast … [and] resulted in expediency and laxity.’ As a consequence, ‘It was, and would be, a bad time for headmasters.’ Likewise, according to Ms Penrose, the 1990s brought new challenges for independent schools, including the economic recession which caused a decline in enrolments. Among their responses, schools continued the pattern of corporatisation begun in the 1980s and, as competition grew, specialists in economics, finance and marketing were seen by school leaders as essential partners on the educational journey. Go back even further in time, and the impact on schools are not just national but global. I didn’t know, for instance, that the balance between providing academic outcomes with an education for life had its genesis in the postdepression era of the 1930s, only to grow in urgency after World War II as

people everywhere sought to educate for good citizenship in the aftermath of the horrors. This translated into calls from all over the world to abolish exams in the realisation that knowledge alone hadn’t been enough to save them from themselves. The historical context is everything for those of us in schools trying to prepare our charges for a post-truth world, characterised by the fourth digital revolution, widespread political disengagement, the dissolution of global bases and the rise of artificial intelligence. The 21st century clearly demands a broad and discrete set of employable skills, and our role is to balance what it means to live a good life against what it means for our students

‘Most important of all, however, is our duty to address the deep-seated existential need that all human beings have for transcendence by providing our students with meaning, purpose and belonging.’

to make a good living in a future that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, changing and ambiguous. This is eminently achievable when we honour our commitment to the whole child by focussing on their lifelong need for traditional knowledge acquisition, their future industry’s need for a range of responsive, transferable skills, and society’s need for the purposeful development of a set of innately human habits of mind so that they are better prepared to navigate the personal and professional complexities that await. Most important of all, however, is our duty to address the deep-seated existential need that all human beings have for transcendence by providing our students with meaning, purpose and belonging. This in turn brings hope – the single greatest protective mechanism for our young people after school when they are often at their most vulnerable. In an oration entitled ‘The Past, Present and Future of School Improvement and System Reform’, Professor David Hopkins rightly argues that the challenge of school improvement and system reform has great ‘moral depth to it’ for it directly addresses ‘the learning needs of our students, the professional growth of teachers and enhances the role of the school as an agent of social change’. As he observes, ‘It is this approach that will eventually lead towards “every school a great school”’, which in turn shall produce a ‘good society’. He concludes his lecture by reflecting on Dr Amitai Etzioni’s ‘inspirational exhortation’ on the nature society, The Third Way to a Good Society, and it’s worth reproducing that here for you to read: ‘We aspire to a society that is not merely civil but is good. A good society is one in which people treat one another as ends in themselves and not merely instruments; as whole persons rather than as fragments; as members of a community … rather than only as employees, traders, consumers or even as fellow citizens. … The good society is an ideal. While we may never quite reach it, it guides our endeavours and we measure our progress by it.’