Dear all,
I hope that you all enjoyed our annual Celebration of Cultures. It seemed to go exceptionally well. Thanks to the music department for the exciting start to proceedings and to all of you who kept students on time and organized.
This weeks Food For Thought starts with this video of Isaac Lindsky presenting at the Global Leadership Conference in 2016. Lindsky coins the phrase 'eyes wide open' to encourage us all to remove excuses from our thinking, shut out the negative thoughts and fears, and live a positive life. As you will see he has overcome challenges and through these discovered a way of living his life that would never have happened without the adversity he faced.
As you will probably have a little bit of time for reading during the vacation I thought that sharing this AEON essay might be of interest to many of you, Can school today teach anything more today than how to pass exams? The essay focuses on the Socratic view of education and learning and provides an interesting alternative to just focusing on exams that is very aligned with our thinking at ISHCMC. In fact the dream classroom scenario that initiatives this essay is not far away from many that I see when walking around our school. I think that most of you will connect with this UK authors view of how students should learn and what the end focus should be.
"To understand how this can be achieved, we need to remember something that Socrates drew our attention to long ago, but which in our eagerness to turn schools into engines of economic productivity we have forgotten, namely that education is a philosophical process. It begins with questioning, proceeds by enquiry, and moves in the direction of deeper understanding. The journey of enquiry is powered by critical reflection, discussion and debate. It leads not to final answers but to a greater appreciation of the limits of our knowledge, both of the world around us and of our own mysterious selves."
Wishing you all a well deserved break,
Yours
Adrian
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