insideKENT Magazine Issue 69 - December 2017 | Page 174

EDUCATION
ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
‘yet’
by Mike Piercy, Headmaster
IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE THAT WE MAY NEVER ESCAPE (OR EVEN MODERATE) A WORLD DOMINATED
BY EXAM HURDLES; THERE HAS TO BE SOME OBJECTIVE MEASURE OF INTELLECT. WHAT WE CAN
HOPE FOR, HOWEVER, IS A WORLD OF EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT WHICH SETS OUT TO
DEVELOP ‘SOFT’ SKILLS. IT IS THESE SOFT SKILLS WHICH WILL BECOME EVER MORE IMPORTANT
IN LIFE AND IN THE WORKPLACE AS AUTOMATION LOOMS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BOUNDS
FORWARD EXPONENTIALLY.
So how can schools respond to this rapidly
changing world? Lessons still have to be
attended, the syllabus covered, teaching and
learning, tests, mocks, exams – it was ever
thus. Exam results propel young people to the
next stage, whether it be senior school,
university or a job.
I recently asked our boys (The New Beacon is
a boys’ school!) how they dealt with
disappointment – not failure, but
disappointment. It is not just ‘PC’ to choose
the word disappointment over the word
failure; it is the avoidance of a value statement.
I asked if they stamped their feet, sulked,
retreated into their shells – for five minutes,
hours, days or weeks. Their response was
revealing and amusing – laughter, and the
dawning of self-realisation. The message was
to turn as quickly as possible from the emotion
of disappointment to the logic of analysis and
reflection, quoting Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“For the robust, an error is information; for the
fragile, an error is an error.”
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I know I am not alone in my concern for the
world into which our children are growing.
Alex Percy, Head of Counselling at Oxford
University, was recently quoted in The
Guardian: “A lot of [students] feel they’ve got
to get everything right.” In a driven world,
concern about making mistakes is becoming
a fear which inhibits learning.
There is nothing wrong with making mistakes;
the problem lies in making the same mistake
time and time again. A positive learning
environment allows room for error – a
negative environment denies that opportunity.
Our children need to be adaptable, resilient;
able to face challenge, change and
disappointment.
Another story from The New Beacon. We took
our Chapel Choir to Dubrovnik. They were to
accompany a church service on the Sunday
morning with sung responses they had never
seen before in an unfamiliar country, an
unfamiliar church with an unfamiliar acoustic.
The church was chosen because it was said
to have a good organ. To our consternation,
there was no organ. The choir would have to
sing unaccompanied and had only two hours’
rehearsal to get it right. I would not tell the
story if they did not rise to the challenge –
and with some style: they were brilliant!
An extreme example, perhaps, relative to the
smaller, day-to-day challenges of spellings,
tables and tests, but there is an intrinsic
element of education which must prepare
children for the trials of life. One of the smallest
words and yet one of the most powerful for
children is ‘yet’: I can’t do it – ‘yet’; I can’t work
it out – ‘yet’, changing the negative to the
positively ambitious. We encourage you to try
this at home.
www.newbeacon.org.uk
thenewbeacon
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