Dear Parents and Caregivers

Greetings, tena koutou katoa, talofa lava

When you receive this newsletter the end of the rush and roar that is Term 3 will be in sight.  

The Winter Sports Season will be winding to a close with some of our teams about to embark on Tournament action designed to test the lads in competition up to national level of performance. That said, I want to thank you for your support as coaches, as side-line supporters or as willing supporters of your son in all the activities that occupy him, and which will help make him into the man he is to become.

When you read this I will be overseas in Japan.  My task will be to sign off my time at Shirley with our sister schools, Meguro in Tokyo, Kyoto Nishi In Kyoto and Toho in Nagoya, and pave the way for the new Headmaster from 2020.

As I reflect on the bedding-in of Shirley  to its new site, somewhat inexorably  my thoughts have focused on the work of the staff to develop 'The Shirley Man'. Their work at its most fundamental level is designed to develop character, because character development comes before long-lasting achievement in pretty much any field of human endeavour.

There is a famous study at Stanford University which was done many years ago. They took four year-old children and put them in a room by themselves with a large piece of marshmallow. They told the children that if they stayed in the room and didn’t eat the marshmallow, they would get two  pieces of marshmallow at the end of  15 minutes. Fascinatingly, only 25% of children managed to delay gratification long enough to get a greater reward. They then took the study and made it into a longitudinal one; they took all the children when grown to first- and second-year university level and compared their level of success.

Without exception the 25% who were successful in delaying gratification were also successful in their endeavours. This study was replicated in Columbia and in Korea.

The question I would ask is, what does this mean for our world and for us as educators?  As early as 2010 I wrote an article for parents, in which I ventured to list some of the things a young man needs if he is to have a chance of being successful in life. These things formed the core of what we know to be “The Shirley Man’ which in turn had its roots in Celia Lashlie’s work on “The Good Man”.

The list of things I itemised included:

• The ability to create good and positive relationships with people from all walks of life and from all ages.
• The ability to absorb and use language that expresses a wide range of emotions and feelings.
• The ability to have beliefs and opinions and to be able to justify these.
• The ability to control emotion and impulse and recognise that love and sex are not necessarily the same thing.
• The ability to be practical and to do practical things.
• The ability to treat others with respect and to be polite always.
• The ability to act responsibly.
• The ability to be resilient and deal with grief and loss.

The list above does not just apply to males, though I suspect that it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the way each of the above manifests itself will vary from male to female.

The first two items above are closely related. Let’s look at how the school helps develop these for its students. Relationships and the ability to describe emotion and feelings develop when real people are doing real things.

In the real world people get angry, they laugh, they cry, they eat too much or too little, they get flatulence, and acne and wrinkles – occasionally all at the same time!

What schools need to do is provide a 'safe' environment in and out of the classroom for young people to develop into mature, wise, older people.  As an aside the word safe does not mean 'sanitised'.  All too often, I think people (parents and teachers) expect schools to provide an environment in which nothing demanding happens at all.  No action, no bad language, no loss of temper. I suspect that the achievement of such an environment is impossible.  Even if it could be done, I would avoid it because such an environment would not prepare people with even the most basic survival skills needed to work and live in the real world.

The good school provides teaching in and out of the classroom that enables a student to take a feeling and translate it into words and so communicate effectively with others. They must provide learning opportunities with action that stretches young peoples' minds while developing their courage. Such activities will help them make good decisions while under pressure and most of all will help them work with other people.

There are of course, issues that act to prevent these desirable outcomes from happening.

In our blame-orientated world, where the mob is all too frequently stirred up by an intellectually and morally bankrupt media or the perpetually outraged trolls that inhabit platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, many organisations have responded by creating an artificial sanitised world.  A world where there are no risks, literally the perfect world to hide in!

For schools, the pressure to do nothing other than ensure students sit in a classroom all day grows.  This is one of the many things that we must continue to resist. Now that we are in our new school, the need for sport, for expeditions, for (dare I say it) Mid-Winter Swims, for real action in a real world is as strong as ever.

Shirley came through the earthquake years because of the character of its community. Now we are in our new school, we must not lose sight of the fact that character development is just as important now as it ever was.  In 2010 and 2011 'The Shirley Man' was put to the test and we did not fail.  When the next test rolls along- and make no mistake, it will, we must ensure we have the strength of character to meet the challenge.

Regards

John Laurenson.