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Construction of diversity: How UWC is actively realising a vision of education that goes beyond the individual

Dr Frazer Cairns, Former Head of Dover Campus

K1 Morning of Sport at Dover

In his 1932 essay On Modern Education and the Classics, T.S. Eliot described education as: “a subject which cannot be discussed in a void: our questions raise other questions, social, economic, financial, political. And the bearings are on more ultimate problems even than these: to know what we want in general, we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life.” In his view, we too often lack the fundamental philosophical basis from which to answer the question ‘what is education for?’ and so fall back on narrow, utilitarian explanations. There is, he said, a preoccupation with ‘getting on’ and perhaps this is why there is an emphasis in some education systems on getting good examination results, ensuring that one is well-placed for university entrance, preparing students for the job market and improving individuals’ material life chances.

Related to this idea of the purpose of education, I was thinking about UWCSEA as compared to my last school and decided that in many ways they are actually very similar. They are both big, multi-campus schools set in an urban environment. They are both academically high-achieving schools. They both benefit from intelligent, demanding, interested (and interesting) students and parents. However, and perhaps most importantly, they both see themselves as having the fundamental purpose of making the world a better place, and so the purpose of education is expressed more widely, at both an individual and a societal level.

UWCSEA and my previous school both aim to bring about change by promoting (amongst other things) intercultural sensitivity and understanding. Yet there are differences in the primary way that the two schools aim to achieve this. In my last school it was through language. If you don’t understand another person’s language, the thinking went, you can’t understand their culture and you can’t understand the nuance of what they are saying to you. Many conflicts have arisen from a lack of understanding of culture and nuance. At UWCSEA language is also seen as being of fundamental importance. However, the aim of mutual understanding is also reached towards another way—through the active construction of a diverse community.

Kurt Hahn is supposed to have said that putting two young people from opposite sides of a cultural divide together on a boat, perhaps in a Northeasterly gale, and having them become thoroughly seasick together, would result in something positive for international education. Perhaps less dramatically at UWCSEA, we try to engineer a situation where people with different past experiences, cultures and worldviews are put in the same classroom and asked to work together.

At first glance a school’s diversity could be taken to be a reflection of the community in which it finds itself. After all, a school in a cosmopolitan city like Singapore has the potential to be enormously diverse. However, the idea of diversity is more difficult than it sounds. It is not at all the case that the passport I hold defines who I am and how I view the world, and it is very possible to have a seemingly diverse group—a South American, an African and a European national, for example—who have had similar past experiences and who share similar expectations for the future. It is also perfectly possible to have two people who carry the same passport find they have lived very different lives and see the world from very different standpoints.

This more subtle kind of diversity is a major aim of our admissions selection process. We don’t have quotas and caps but do we look to actively choose people who bring new experiences and new views to the community. Such diversity is also a fundamental aim of the scholarship programme, and by bringing in individuals from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds we enhance the educational experience for all of our students. How this changes the school can be seen by considering the students from one of our primary classes studying the subject of conflict. The teachers could have shown a video, or read from a textbook. Instead students from Timor-Leste, Rwanda and Cambodia went in and spoke to 11 year-olds about the impact that conflict had on their lives. Learning about conflict is important. Learning directly from someone who has lived through it is a very different learning experience.

Getting good examination results, ensuring that one is well placed for university entrance are legitimate and important purposes of education. But they can easily crowd out the more fundamental objectives of our mission statements. The fact that, as I write this, students have been reflecting in assemblies on the horrific Pakistani school massacre that left 153 dead, and the attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, underlines how important it is to continue to make intercultural understanding one of the primary aims of education.

UWCSEA—and UWC schools and colleges in general—are not the only schools in the world to have a vision of education that goes beyond the individual. However, given the world desperately needs young people with the type of understanding and experience that can transform inter-cultural relationships, thank goodness we have that vision and are actively realising it in our practices.