From the Principal
Their discovery of the double helix has changed the scientific landscape . So too, Ray Kroc’s question, ‘I wonder where I can get a good hamburger on the road?’, contributed to the birth of McDonalds. Sometimes basic questions betray the complexities of their answers. A mother once asked her son, ‘Why don’t you quit fooling around in that garage and get a real job?’ Her son - Steve Wozniak - was the inventor of the Apple Computer. In many ways at Fairholme College, 2012 began with a question – indeed a series of questions. For two full days in January the Leadership Team and College Chairman gathered with an educational and business consultant to think strategically. Specifically, such questions as these listed, were pondered upon:
If the evidence is so overwhelming that great teachers make great students, why hasn’t something been done earlier?
And a bonus question: Did you have a great teacher at school?
Furthermore, our 2012 educator and thinker in residence, Tony Ryan, has posed many questions during the year, such as: Do you understand the difference between perfection and excellence? He regularly finished staff meeting sessions with us by saying What? So What? What Now? We are provoked to think, rather than to respond. If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the fi rst 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper
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How do we defi ne our school? Where are we headed? How do we honour the things of our past? What do we want to look like in three years’ time?
The answers did not lie easily at our fingertips through Google or Wikipedia. They are powerful and important questions that demand and require discussion, debate, disagreement and deliberation. What emerged from our discussions was a lengthy consultation process with students, staff and parents, as well as a series of documents that will frame our thinking and our questions for the next three years and beyond. How do we embed our identified core values: Christ-centred faith, collaboration, enjoyment, respect and seeking excellence within our daily practice? Whilst some answers emerged in our strategic planning, other questions have emerged during the year, like the parent who asked recently … ‘Is Fairholme a good school, or a great school?’ Or the teacher who gave me a copy of Simon Sinek’s book, ‘Start with Why’, or another parent who gave me a copy of an article from The Australian in March this year entitled ‘10 questions: Ben Jensen, 37, education expert’. It included such thought-provokers as:
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If installing computers in every classroom and constructing new school buildings have failed to lift performance, what will?
What makes a great teacher?
question, I could solve the problem is less than f i ve minutes. Albert Einstein Questions can also elicit dangerous responses, such as one from Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl who was attacked by the Taliban while travelling on a school bus on 9 October 2012. Malala has been billed as ‘the girl who just wanted to go to school.’ Her enduring and courageous question has been, ‘Why can’t girls have access to education?’ It was a question she first began asking in earnest in 2009 when a BBC journalist posted her handwritten notes on a blog site under a pseudonym; it was a question that led Desmond Tutu to nominate her for an international children’s prize, and to the Pakistan government awarding its first ever National Peace Prize, in December 2011. And yet it was Malela and not the government who, in a rather prophetic moment, envisaged a confrontation with the Taliban as a result of her question. She said this, ‘I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.’ This young woman is fighting for her life because she asked: ‘Why aren’t all girls entitled to an education?’ Educational academic Professor Erica McWilliam – at a recent presentation asked this, ‘Why do we need discomfort in order to learn?
Using examples from Mary Russell’s book, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt, she identified little-known women from the past century or so who have experienced discomfort in order to achieve their goals. She used these examples as a counterpoint to our sanitised 21st-century world where, in her words, ‘lawn mower teachers and curling parents ensure that no young person has a negative experience’. It is an age she describes as embracing a therapeutic approach to education and she believes she must pose these questions: What are schools for? How do we stop the avoidance of difficulty or the belief that success is an entitlement, a right and that it should be easy? McWilliam also asks, What if the highest achievers in the next decades won’t necessarily be our OP 1 students or our A graders but those who are agile, persistent learners and those who can deal with discomfort and failure? What if the world we have created where everyone gets a ribbon for trying will destroy the very strength we need to face the future? What if? If we draw from history we think first of Christ whose agonising question was, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’, Or of Rosa Parks whose tired legs forced her to take a seat on a bus, on a seat reserved for whites, where she asked, ‘Why? Why do you push us around?’ The quest is for the question, not the answer – a mirror of Socrates who wandered around Athens asking questions to get to a deeper truth. Perhaps it is a question that those leaving Fairholme this year will have better perspective to answer in the near future. How do we answer the question: Is Fairholme a good school or a great school? We do so by considering our school leavers – those wonderful Year 12 girls whose future paths will inevitably provide an answer. What will they do to make a difference? What plans does God have for their next steps? If only we knew. We can but trust that at the heart of their life will be the following core self values in evidence – both philosophically and behaviourally: Christ-centred Faith | Collaboration | Enjoyment | Respect | Seeking Excellence Mr Ian Andersen | Chairman Fairholme: a nurturing Christian school, committed to developing a vibrant learning community; one that challenges students to become confident and respectful contributors within our global society. (Vision statement 2012) Mrs Linda Evans | Principal