It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Become

This past Friday, for the second Friday in a row, I had the chance to raise a glass and share time with a group of our former students. Two Fridays ago this was with alumni from a broad spectrum of classes going back over 50 years at our annual Alumni Reunion Dinner. This past week, in Halifax, the group were current university students with the oldest kids being 21 or 22 years old. Two consecutive Fridays that included the telling and retelling of stories from the past; such is the nature of reunions. Two consecutive Fridays of laughter and memories. Two consecutive Fridays where my night ended with the vague rhetorical question, “Was all of this just a little bit simpler back then than it is now?”

I fully accept that some of this consideration may have everything to do with my age. It’s the birthright of everyone over a certain age to look back with fondness on the past and lament some intangible that has somehow been lost to the inescapable march of time.

But/and, it would be disingenuous to not articulate the truth that we are living in an age of disruption. It would be disingenuous to not articulate the truth that we are trying to educate children in an age of disruption. I think what we do around here was certainly less complex a decade ago than it is now.

Back in October I attended the CAIS Heads and Chairs Conference in beautiful Kelowna, BC. This year marks my twentieth year as a Head of a CAIS school, and this annual conference is such a gift for me to sit with people much smarter than me who do the same job that I do. It’s equal parts professional learning and group therapy.

One of the speakers at the Conference, Iliana Oris Valiente named, in her Tuesday morning keynote address, the disruptors whose presence we all feel but whose identity had not fully formed in my mind: the rapid change in geopolitics; Artificial Intelligence; and societal polarization.

None of these disruptors are the creation of any of us at Royal St. George’s College. And yet, both we and the kids whom we welcome with love every morning, sit in the backwash of their turbulence. We work very hard to control what we can control and leave the contentiousness of geopolitics and the polarization outside of our village. We are learning together how to manage and embrace the challenges and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence.

Valiente’s keynote was mostly centred on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society and, keeping her audience in mind, on the future of education. She cited four domains that she believes will be paramount in education in the near future: nervous system regulation, focus, critical thinking, and empathy. In the uncertain future of bespoke, personalized bots alongside our learners, she sees the central role of schools as being to allow the humans to be more human. School is not about what you know, it is about who you become.

Bringing this back to the laughs and the stories of our graduates over the past two Friday nights, I also understand that the disruptors and the future of education play right into the domain that already defines our excellence. While our alumni universally cite how well prepared they were academically for the challenges they face in their chosen university programs, that’s not really what they want to talk about. It’s the humans and the relationships that resonate the loudest. It’s the respect, empathy and love that they felt everyday as kids and adolescents. It’s the spaces where they were allowed to make mistakes, to fall down knowing that they’d still be seen and cherished in their course correction. While they’d never use the words, it’s where their adolescent nervous systems were regulated; they were introduced and allowed to explore their passions; they were given both the skills and the agency to think critically; and they experienced, every single day, the empathy that is foundational in a place that cherishes “the best version of self” over simply “the best.”

Maybe it was simpler a decade ago. Maybe not. Maybe that’s just the lens of a guy who’s been doing this a long time. What we do—and do better than any other school I know—is certainly more important right now than it was a decade ago. The education of children will always be a human enterprise at our school. Committing to the human part of the co-raising of kids is bred in the bones of our school. It is our institutional DNA. The headwinds are stronger and, therefore, our resolve and the clarity of our mission must be equal to those headwinds.

Allow the humans to be more human. That’s always been the work.