Professional Learning Journal: Headmaster's Article

KING’S

2021 Professional Learning Journal

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use”.

- Galileo Galilei -

WELCOME DIRECTOR OF THE KING’S INSTITUTE

Dean Dudley, CF PhD (UW), M.Ed – Research (UW), CAEL

(Harvard), Grad Dip Ed (UWS), B.HSc (UWS)

The 2021 Professional Learning Journal (PLJ) of The King’s Institute is our last publication of the School’s 2019-2021 Strategic Triennium. It allows us to close one metaphorical chapter of The King’s Institute whilst bravely and faithfully proposing what its next chapter will entail.

We increase our chances of success in any range of intervention strategies which the School pursues in the next Strategic Triennium by tapping our collective wisdom.

This refers to the wisdom of our own school community, of other implementers of the same program, and of the wider implementation world. Collective wisdom allows each of us to benefit from the experience of many of us. Success is in the ongoing process, in being able to adjust to the inevitable and numerous deviations from the plan that will befall any school-based intervention attempt, even with the best evidence-based program.

The 2021 wave of the COVID-19 pandemic once again dealt us a disruptive hand with which to toil in the profession of pedagogy. That said, teachers have again emerged in the long line of heroes that have united our society in a period when we have felt anything but united. The King’s School’s commitment to the critical work of our teachers within our community is celebrated throughout the pages of this year’s Professional Learning Journal.

The King’s Institute’s challenge now is to translate our collective wisdom into a collection of reasoning. In other words, we seek to promote cooperation among people who often have conflicting commitments using cooperative ways of reasoning together.

Please enjoy the collection of professional learning activities and articles contained within this year’s PLJ as an opportunity to embrace fresh thinking, controversy, and collective achievement.

It is a celebration because whilst the times were challenging and the learning disrupted, many of our teachers and staff have participated, learned and created new forms of knowledge. The King’s Institute serves to empower teachers and staff of The King’s School to build individual and collective wisdom.

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The King’s School Professional Learning 2021

The Power of Y in Schools

This paper provokes thought about the purpose of education in an age of genderism and sexualisation in schools.

While some may take a reductionistic view of education as simply inculcating students with sufficient knowledge and skills to gain entrance to a university or employment, as evidenced in the annual league tables of schools, others take a more expansive view of education as the formation of people, of gifting each student with an identity. Certainly, this identity includes a student’s passion for particular kinds of knowledge and skills that will inform their ongoing studies and career choices. However, a person’s identity is more than the sum of the

The King’s School is committed to, and passionate about, boys’ education. For some this may seem a rather antiquated idea, as opponents of single-sex schools assert that gender equality has made single sex schools obsolete. Others argue that the new age of gender fluidity heralds an age of trans-gender, non-gender, multigender and any-gender that necessarily renders single-sex education as irrelevant.

The social media platform formally known as Facebook, it is claimed, recognises more than 70 different genders, rendering gender effectively meaningless. Gender, sex and sexuality have become terms that not only confuse but have become increasingly confusing. In 2005, the

being increasingly used as an ideological weapon. Poor behaviour, including criminal behaviour, is being attributed to things such as “toxic masculinity”. Even notions of “consent” and “victimhood” are being framed as sexualised malaises. The age of sexual liberationism in the 1960’s has been replaced 50 years later with sexual totalitarianism, where nearly every problem is about sex, gender or sexuality.

“At The King’s School, our view of education is far broader than merely that of knowledge and skills.” knowledge and skills gained during their schooling. It includes their physiology and culture, their spirituality and gender, their hopes and aspirations, their wisdom and discernment, and their values, beliefs and attitudes, to mention but a few.

Identity is a complex concept and develops uniquely for each person within the context of their community. Yet, whenever one speaks of identity today, the discussion invariably turns down a cul-de-sac that is heavily gendered and sexualised. This paper discusses a potential way to reverse out of this cul-de-sac.

Journal of Applied Physiology took effort in its editorial to remind its readers of the need for clarity when using the terms ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ (Journal of Applied Physiology 99: 785-787, 2005), as many authors were using these terms interchangeably in the scientific literature, adding to the confusion. The Journal of Applied Physiology made the assertion that sex is biological, gender is cultural, and sexuality is behavioural as the interplay of our biology and culture.

At The King’s School, our view of education is far broader than merely that of knowledge and skills. However, society’s confusion over sex, gender and sexuality has contributed to the sexualisation of identity with gender

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Tony George Headmaster

The Purpose of Schools Schools are supposed to be happy, inviting, and adventurous places where we learn about ourselves, each other and our world. Schools are places where we find and form ourselves. The gift of education is the gift of identity. How sad it is, that identity today has become all about sex, gender and sexuality. For surely there is more to identity than sex! Whether I am a man, a husband, a father, are all important alongside being an Australian, a Christian, a scientist, a musician, a sportsman, a teacher and so on. But to limit my identity to my sex, gender, or sexuality is a travesty of education and of my humanity.

The sexual totalitarianism of modern society should be considered a malaise on our humanity. We need to rescue our schools and education from the gender extremism that has sexualised our world.

Schools as communities are essential for identity formation. For almost all of human history, our identity is something

Consequently, much of our quest for a modern sexualised identity could be considered as a self-indulgent, western, affluent fetishism.

For starters, do we really think that sex, gender and sexuality should be dominating our thinking and experience in schools? Let kids be kids and stop sexualising them and their identity.

For most kids it’s not an issue and for those for whom it is an issue, it’s the exception not the norm. So, let’s not normalise the exception. This is not to say that this is not an issue for some.

It is to say we should not normalise or generalise the exception. To be inclusive is to create a safe place where people can be themselves. While we need to accommodate and respect the needs of vegans, for example, we don’t need to make everyone vegan. Let vegans be vegans and those who aren’t, aren’t!

The increasing emphasis on education as delivering knowledge and skills neglects

“The problem of biological identity arose evolutionarily as a fundamental issue of being able to move. As animals, we move.” that has been formed in the context of the community into which we were born and in which we lived. It is only a recent phenomenon of modernity that we can now “choose” our identity. This modern choice is one that is the privilege of the developed world. It is predominantly the domain of the western affluent and certainly not that of the developing world, such as the Sudanese farmer struggling to put food on the table for his family.

the more important purpose of education in developing wisdom, discernment and judgement through a consideration of meaning and significance. These constitute the essential educational recipe upon which identity formation depends.

Identity doesn’t result from the teaching of knowledge and skills, as important as they are for a productive life. Rather, identity forms within the community context of meaning and significance that encourages

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the development of wisdom and judgement.

Thus, schools are communities of meaning and significance that gift identity to their students. It is this process of ‘gifting identity’ in schools that warrants further consideration.

To start, it is important to acknowledge that identity is first and foremost a biological phenomenon. As much as we might like to think of ourselves as independent beings with free will, the fact of the matter is that we are very much biologically determined. That is the reality of our genetics. Genetically, we are born human.

We may want to identify as a goat, a lion or mosquito, but our genetics determine our species and our sex. As humans we are born male or female. Certainly, there are genetic abnormalities such as Kleinfelder’s Syndrome, but this is the exception and not the norm. Our genetics determine our biological identity as an evolutionary reality.

The evolution of modern science has given people greater access to altering their biology and their genetics. Whilst this may be the case, the reality is that although we can dive to the depths of the ocean and launch ourselves into space, we still need to respect our biological identity and dependency by taking our biological life-support system with us. While there is no limit to our imagination, there is an ever present genetic, spatial and temporal limit to our biology. We defy nature at our own peril.

The problem of biological identity arose evolutionarily as a fundamental issue of being able to move. As animals, we move.

This creates issues of both safety and reproduction. We need to stay away from things that might eat us and find mates with which to reproduce. A goat that identifies as a lion doesn’t do so for long.

The King’s School Professional Learning 2021

The Power of Y in Schools CONTINUED

For not only does it fail to find other goats with which to reproduce, it inadvertently ends up as a lion’s meal. The finding of one’s self in a world of selves is of fundamental importance for one’s survival and reproduction. Further, this principle of finding one’s self in a world of selves is why identity is not about our uniqueness, but about similarity. Identity is about recognising those with whom we identify, with whom we are similar. Identity has become increasingly misunderstood as something unique. The absurdity of this position is that a truly unique being has no-one with whom they can identify or reproduce. So, identity is about finding one’s herd, not merely one’s self.

Identity is also based on the principle of mutual recognition. Species are able to reproduce because individuals mutually recognise each other. Goats recognise each other, as do lions. But a goat that identifies as a lion depends on lions also recognising him as lion rather than lunch.

This principle of mutual recognition also

For boys who are born as human males, there is the genetic reality of being born with a Y-chromosome. This results in human males being born with an onboard Steroidal Testosterone Pump which is ever ready as an anti-inflammatory that assists in building physical strength, among other things. Generally speaking, boys are stronger, faster and bigger than their female counterparts. This is clearly evident in the separation of the sexes in sport and athletics. Boys tend to be more physical, active and energetic. This is a generalisation. Boys are not smarter, more intelligent or better in other ways. It’s just that they have the biological ability to produce more testosterone. This in turn means that biologically boys are different with a different biological identity to that of girls. This is a biological thing, not a cultural thing. It has to do with genetics, not thoughts.

There is also a modern problem that sees some people claiming that they have the right mind in the wrong body, as though

“Generally speaking, boys are stronger, faster and bigger than their female counterparts. This is clearly evident in the separation of the sexes in sport and athletics.” applies in terms of human institutions such as bank accounts and citizenship.

As much as I might identify as Bill Gates in order to access his bank account, I depend on the principle of mutual recognition by the bank in order to do so.

their identity is somehow independent of their biological reality. This problem owes much to Cartesian Dualism and the Mind/ Body Problem, which was a philosophical disaster of the seventeenth century.

The idea is simply that as a person I am

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made of a mind and a body, which can be separated. While Cartesian Dualism has been largely discredited by both philosophers and scientists, it still holds sway with much of the general population. A philosopher by the name of Thomas Nagel conducted a thought experiment on what it might be like to be a bat (Thomas Nagel, The Philosophical Review, Vol 83, No.4, 1974). Nagel’s conclusion was that in order to know what it might be like to be a bat, we would need to know what “batness” was like with respect to certain batness qualities. Needless to say, these qualities are beyond our knowledge, just as our qualities of humanness, or maleness, or femaleness, or Caucasianness, or Christianness, are beyond clear and succinct definition. The implications of Nagel’s thought experiment are quite profound, in that I can barely know what is to be myself, let alone know what it is to be someone or something else. Consequently, biological identity is something that is a genetic given, and yet is also something that I am unable to experience outside of myself. Biologically, I only know what it is to be me.

Human identity is not only a biological phenomenon, but also a cultural phenomenon and as a cultural phenomenon, we get to choose. While historically our choices may have been limited, due to the family occupation and village religion we were born into, in our modern world we get to choose our profession, our beliefs and attitudes, our preferred place to live. Yet even though it seems we live a life of choice, much

of it is determined linguistically by the memetics of our cultural identity. For many of us, our culture was chosen for us by our family upbringing, and the strength of our enculturation should not be underestimated. This was the insight of Critical Theory, which subsequently contributed to the politicisation of identity.

The idea of Critical Theory is simply that we are all shaped, if not enslaved, by the culture into which we were born and grew up. Further, we can liberate ourselves and others by exposing the presuppositions that exert such influence over us. However, the significant limitation of Critical Theory is a kind of one-sided Cartesian Dualism that rejects any notion of a biological reality by defining everything as cultural. In seeking emancipation from cultural bondage, Critical Theory risks disrespecting our biological reality. Thus, the modern self becomes pure invention (Note: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Carl R Trueman, 2020).

The loss of meaning and significance has contributed to the loss of our humanity.

While meaning and significance are culturally bound and contextualised, it is meaning and significance that tether us to each other, as our bodies tether us biologically, both spatially and temporally. As persons, we depend on trusting others and being trusted by others and it is this being tethered within a scaffold of trust that grounds us relationally, it gives us our identity. We

know who we are because we know those with whom we identify and who, in turn, identify with us – our identity is situated within the hermeneutics of trust, and it is here we find our security.

Thus, school communities need to be hermeneutic communities of meaning and significance, and not just epistemic communities of knowledge and skills.

While we live as biological beings, we are secured as cultural beings.

The scientific reality of biological sex is not something to be questioned or doubted when it comes to the biological world, even when it seems as though humans have somehow transcended their biological reality and can identify as anything they like. This is an important issue when considering the purpose of school-based education, particularly in terms of whether education merely concerns knowledge and skills, or whether it extends to wisdom, meaning, significance and identity formation.

This paper sought to have us think more broadly about education and to embrace the semantic importance of sex, gender and sexuality when considering personhood and identity formation in our boys.

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“The scientific reality of biological sex is not something to be questioned or doubted when it comes to the biological world.“

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