Dear Parents and Caregivers

Greetings, tena koutou katoa, talofa lava.

Nearly 10 years ago 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 form the core of what we now know to be “The Shirley Man’ and that, 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 occupations 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 at all times.
  
• 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, of course, though it would be reasonable 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 us 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, somewhat interestingly all at the same time!

What schools need to do is provide a safe environment for this to happen. 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 but 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.

Schools need to provide rich learning experiences, both in and out of the classroom. They must enable a student to take a feeling, translate it into words, and so communicate effectively with others. They must provide learning opportunities with action that stretches the young people’s minds while developing their courage. Such activities lead to learning, and that in turn will help them make good decisions, even 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, many organisations create 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 beyond the classroom grows as a result.

What must we prepare young men to deal with? In Shirley, this year a highlight for the school was the mid-winter swim which had as a bonus, the aim of raising money for Search and Rescue. This activity offered the opportunity to staff and students to help others less well off than themselves. It involved hard work in which large groups worked together. It involved real experiences that were physically and emotionally difficult, experiences that had to be worked through to the end, experiences in which the power generated by a large group working together overcame the hardships along the way.

What makes good things difficult to achieve?

Last week I presented a resource in assembly called “Consent, it’s as simple as having a cup of tea”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGoWLWS4-kU)

The reason for this was simple enough, the messages about right and wrong and personal responsibility are not consistent in the world in which we live.

Of great concern is the increasing number of young men obsessed with the soulless electronic world of Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, and so on. This world is immensely attractive to young people and while unquestionably there are benefits, just as unquestionably there is a dark side as well. This is a world where inhibitions are few and coupled with a human desire to be popular, and the speed at which relationships can get personal while online; a boy can become very vulnerable to both sexual predators and dysfunctional peers. This is a world of porn – a very accessible world, where a recent Canadian study revealed seven out of ten boys access porn on the net. Up to 20% of them will view it at a friend’s place. Let’s also be frank about that, despite what some might say, there is nothing glamorous about this sordid, often violent world that involves every type of sexual encounter with the resultant de-sensitisation of young men, to the consequences of such things in the real world.

This is a world when personal barriers are lowered and the power to be hurt magnified as a result, especially as mature support is not readily available. Gaming in the cyber world is another fraught area; it is not uncommon for cyber games to feature murder, mutilation and torture as desirable outcomes. Hacking for fun is seen as a game, despite the awful consequences that can result from hacking into other people’s Facebook or Myspace pages. In the cyber world, a young man’s ability to relate to other human beings is simplified to the point of becoming dangerous because, in the real world, things cannot ever be solved by hitting the delete button.

One thing is certain, it is not possible to legislate such problems away. It is not possible to ignore them and, in an artificial sanitised environment, development of the skills for dealing with such problems is not high on the list of things to do. What schools must do is accept that problems will not go away – they have to be dealt with. In the first instance, they are dealt with by clearly articulating the risks involved and this must involve discussion in the classroom as well enabling discussion to occur where real experiences with real people are the focus.

This is the aim of so much that we do here at Shirley, in PTA sponsored evenings such as the one we had last term and in the ongoing work run by guidance and deans that are aimed to alert students to the dangers and to develop in them the ability to make good choices in their lives.

This term is a critically important one for your son.  Weather will still be demanding. There are many sporting and cultural activities that will occupy him and winter ailments will not have begun to dissipate. Beyond all things, there is the need to maintain effort on work emanating from the classroom, and to not lose sight of the fact that everyone will be having major end-of-year assessments that need careful preparation, that cannot be put off for later.

Best Wishes

John Laurenson.