OPINION
We are a United World College By Chris Edwards Head of College UWC South East Asia
the letters ‘UWC’ replaced by me with the words ‘this organisation’). It’s well worth a careful read.
I wonder if this sounds familiar?
There was good reason, a decade ago, to re-work and abbreviate the mission statement, but as with most abbreviations, there is loss. What we have lost, to quote one of my fellow UWC Heads, Laurence Nodder, “is the notion of commitment to specific ideals as necessary to achieve the broader ideals of peace and sustainability. This is especially so for the ideals of justice and cooperation.” I agree. I think many of us take the word ‘peace’ as a catchall into which social justice, for example, falls, but we all know you can have de facto peace without social justice.
Through international education, shared experience and community service, this organisation will enable young people to become responsible citizens, politically and environmentally aware, committed to the ideals of peace, justice, understanding and co-operation and to the implementation of these ideals through action and personal example. We sometimes speak of the UWC mission as is if it were an ancient, infallible text, hewn in stone and dictated by superior beings. I can imagine Indiana Jones stumbling upon the casket in which the original has resided for centuries, deep in the heart of a glowing mountain. Even at UWCSEA, I have heard the ‘mission’ used as an inerrant justification for sundry issues: from requests for bigger departmental budgets (“How can you expect us to fulfil the mission if …”) to astonishment that we do not accept children of all cognitive and physical abilities (“You want to unite nations but you can’t even unite all the children on your doorstep?”). I have the mission quoted at me a lot, sometimes by people on either side of a debate to support wholly contrary points of view. That’s all fine, because the mission is not supposed to be a syllogistic triumph any more than the Upanishads. Unlike the Upanishads, the current UWC mission statement is actually about ten years old (roughly the same age, then, as the Airbus A380, flagship of Singapore Airlines. Or, if it’s a more useful reference point, Shrek 2.). To be fair, it didn’t come out of nowhere. At the top of this article, you can see an earlier iteration of the mission (with
So it was always heartening and often inspirational to have social justice and specific ideals so much to the fore at the UWC Congress in Trieste, Italy in October. Towards the end of half term I had my usual bi-annual meeting with other UWC Heads, but this year, as happens every six or seven years, it was followed by Congress, when the doors are thrown open to the wider UWC community. Six hundred alumni, students, staff, board, council members and friends of the movement attended. There was little in the way of selfcongratulatory indulgence, and any naval gazing was rapidly swept away by a sense of purpose and urgency that have not, perhaps, been obvious leitmotifs of the movement thus far. As I said in a recent letter to parents, there were many highlights; the Syrian UWC National Committee explaining how, under unimaginable conditions, they identify, interview and support students to go to UWCs around the world; the President of the Norwegian Red Cross speaking about the work of his teams and those of the Red Crescent in the world’s most dangerous streets, including Aleppo’s; the moving testimony of the parents
of UWC alumnus Giulio Regeni whose brutal murder in Egypt while he was researching that country’s trade unions elicited global outrage. For a number of reasons, but especially because we are so very fortunate in Singapore, and because so many of our parental body engage vigorously with the mission, it might be easy to see UWCSEA as being a large, selfsufficient entity standing outside of the UWC movement. On a day to day basis, I suspect the ‘movement’ is back in the recesses of our thinking (if it’s there at all) whereas the ‘mission’ is, for many within our community, our primum mobile. But Trieste confirmed—if it needed confirming—that UWCSEA should see movement and mission as reticulated, and we should remember the extent to which we are not just a part of but indebted to this network. The UWCSEA students who were present will make a better case than I, but the palpable dynamism, passion and exigency displayed at Congress, especially as manifest by those working around the world in the most difficult and distressing conditions, made clear why we are a movement and not just an organisation. While appreciating it is hardly a neat metaphor when speaking of movement, Trieste was a grounding. The current mission statement may only be a decade old, but it resonated with the authority of the ages. We are not committed merely to an holistic education but a Hahnian education. We are not focussed ferociously on self optimisation, but values and an attendant bias for action. We are not a great international school that does service, we are a missiondriven school committed to peace, social justice and sustainability. We are a United World College.
December 2016 Dunia | 5