PRINCIPAL
MR TOM BATTY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL
SEEKING BALANCE BETWEEN HARMONY AND ADVANCEMENT
In the pre-lockdown , but number plate sensitive , days of the mid-year break , I was out for a jog in rural northwest NSW , when an image captured my mind . It was of the red dirt of the bush encroaching on the newly tarmacked road along which I was suffering . Like many small regional towns in NSW , the infrastructure of the community I was in is well maintained by state government services , and it ’ s just as well : the bush won ’ t be beaten . It can be held up by our ingenuity and toil , but it has time on its side . Later in the day , while out on a bush property , it came to my mind to question how long , in the absence of targeted individual and communal effort , it would take for the bush to completely reclaim the town : three
generations ? five ? I suspect not long in the history of the land , nor , indeed , in that of those who have been on it longest .
Returning to cross the state border in the nick of time , I took in the magnificence of the Scotch grounds and pondered the same question . So much of our efforts and progress have been directed at holding nature at bay and bending it to our desires . This has , perhaps , been the source of our greatest leaps forward , but it also , perhaps , reminds of our vulnerability . As former CEO of BP , Lord Browne , observed in a recent interview with the Cambridge Judge Business School , the coronavirus pandemic upon us is a natural disaster , in that it is a disaster from nature . The balance that we seek and accept between harmony – with each other and our world – and the advancement of our species , is as old as we are and its consideration has been , and should still be , the cornerstone of a liberal education .
In current times of pandemic , such consideration takes form in debate over the balance of priority between health of people and health of economies , and how the two are entwined . It takes form in the release of pent-up anger and frustration across the world over inequities in the lives of people of colour following the death of George Floyd .
In his 1965 Cambridge University Union debate with William Buckley , James Baldwin insisted that progress requires sensitivity to frames of reference other than those formed by our own experience . I would contend , perhaps with a mathematician ’ s love of proof , that , in turn , this requires common axiomatic values upon which questions , such as that I first saw posed by Ta-Nehisi Coates ( I believe it to be attributable to sociologist , Oliver Cromwell Cox ) – What came first , race or racism ? – can be explored . In the absence of such framework , it is all too easy for short-term goals to dominate and disempower . History suggests , that once established , such hierarchies can take a long time to change ; longer still when they are enshrined in Law .
As well as taking the odd jog , I managed a bit of reading beneath the big skies and winter sun of rural NSW . I finished James M McPherson ’ s magnificent account of the American Civil War , Battle Cry of
4 Great Scot Issue 160 – September 2020