Shaping a better world. One world at a time: So can we change the world? I tell the students we can.

Brian Ó Maoileoin, Primary School Principal, Dover Campus

Some might call it naive and unrealistic that UWCSEA’s educational goal is a lofty ambition that our students take responsibility for shaping a better world. That it is a goal rendered meaningless by the very fact that it is unachievable. If this is true, why is it there at all? 

A child in Grade 4 some years ago went home in tears to her Mum, who came to see me the next day. “There is so much sadness and hardship in the world,” the little girl had said. “What is the point in trying - there is so much to solve and it never ends. It simply never ends.”

Having calmed her down a little, Mum managed to glean from her sobbing daughter that she had collected $49.50 at a Bake Sale that day, a sum she had sweated to earn, the result of a few lost playtimes, a few hours in the Plaza Tent and more than a few emails and calls in the lead up to remind her less enthusiastic helpers that they had promised to bring in items to sell. All of which she had been happy to do - it had been her idea after all. But it ended up meaning nothing because the enormous extent and variety of the issues, the impossible number of needy cases, meant her earnings might remove a drop of water from what seemed to her an uncrossable, seething ocean of hurt. She felt utterly overwhelmed by it and despondent. “We can’t change the world,” she said. “My stupid $49.50, my stupid Bake Sale, my stupid good intentions - if I do it a thousand more times, it won’t change the world.”

Indeed. We do worry here about feeding into the children’s sense of doom and gloom - that our efforts to highlight the value of service to others might leave them with a feeling that the world is still headed to hell in a handbasket no matter what. We are especially sensitive to this with Primary School children.

There are two ways of looking at this. It is correct that there is “the world” which exists whether we exist or not - mountains, rivers, cities - it existed before we were born and will continue when we are gone. One small Grade 4 person can do little to change that world.

There is also, however, the world that exists only in an individual's experience of it - received uniquely and personally through each person’s eyes and defined by each person's context. There are as many views of that world as there are people who peer out at it. A child who is born into abject poverty, and whose daily life is defined by despair, loneliness, hunger and fear - the world, for that child, is a cruel, unfeeling one. And there is no other.

When that child goes one day to his weekly session, run perhaps by the Temple Garden Foundation in Cambodia or by Mumbai Mobile Creche or by CWIN in Nepal - and receives a shoebox from UWCSEA filled with toiletries, or a pair of shoes from one of our students, or candy from Project Sweet Tooth, suddenly there is something new and unfamiliar for them. Some generosity, some love, some brotherhood - that makes things seem somehow different when they look up and ponder the sky that day. A slightly brighter sun, a whiff of kindness in the breeze perhaps that wasn’t there yesterday: a better world seen through eyes made recently happier by a child.

So can we change the world? I tell the students we can. And more importantly, we do. One world at a time, for one person at a time, and many times over.

Not bad for $49.50.