If there is a quality not lacking in school leaders in 2021, it is courage. We have had the courage to lead school communities around the globe through the toughest challenge: ensuring that education doesn’t become a victim of Covid-19.
By coincidence, 2021 is the Year of the Ox in the Chinese zodiac. A perfect symbol of everything educators, school leaders, support staff, students and school communities around the world stand for right now.
In the Chinese zodiac, the ox represents hard work, diligence, intelligence, reliability and integrity. The ox never demands praise and is there in the background performing its duty. The pandemic has seen these qualities come to the fore in school leadership and, in international schools, the collaborations, sharing of ideas, and support networks, have allowed education not only to continue, but also to flourish.
It is the courage to ensure our education not only survives but thrives in the 2020s that is the challenge for all international school leaders, especially as the global challenges we faced before the pandemic are still there.
“The pandemic has seen some Ox-like qualities come to the fore in school leadership.”
Michael Fullan, the great Canadian education writer, once famously asked “What is worth fighting for in education?”. The answer is more clear this year than ever before. Young people, the future and the hope for better days: that is what is worth fighting for now, and we need the right kind of leadership to take on this challenge and win.
I know my role as an international school leader is to prepare young people to assume their leadership roles in our societies and communities, ready for the future. As my hero Kurt Hahn once said of our true purpose as leaders in education: “If we cannot change the world ourselves, we might do so by creating leaders who can change it through education”.
We often assume our schools are “international” based on the curriculum they follow, their locations, or the composition of the student and staff bodies. We see the role of our international schools as not only fostering international mindedness and respectful intercultural dialogue, but also as the place where future global citizens are developed.
As school leaders, we need to continue to revisit what we are doing daily in our school systems and cultures to ensure that we can find successful strategies to make our organisations create the very leaders, in Hahn’s words, that we need for the challenges of the 2020s and beyond.
“The pandemic has shown us the necessity of educators and the importance of an educated populace in any society.”
This also requires a lot of courage and it is not for the faint-hearted. Like the proverbial Chinese ox, most of the work we are doing in our schools is unsung. But if the pandemic has done anything positive for education, it is to show the absolute necessity of the work of educators and the importance of an educated populace in any society.
For those of us in international schools, being globally minded is an essential requirement for the public good as well. The pandemic didn’t see national frontiers any more than global issues such as climate change, income inequality, educational access or refugees had seen them in the first decades of the 21st century.
The pandemic has also made even more irrelevant the tired, befuddled insult of “globalist” still popular with the narrow nationalist populists in various corners of the globe as we see the move back towards deep critical thinking, contextualising social media and the role of technology, fact-based evidence and respect for people who are experts in their fields.
The statement at the start of 2021 by António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, that vaccine nationalism is not only unfair but self-defeating, illustrated clearly the interdependent globalised world of the 2020s. Our courage in our moral leadership in international schools, providing this ethos and learning environment, is also – in the words of Fullan – definitely worth fighting for as school leaders.
“The pandemic didn’t see national frontiers any more than global issues such as climate change, income inequality, educational access or refugees.”
Our duty as international schools to our wider national education communities has been demonstrated in the pandemic where systems have worked together, across sectors, to find workable local solutions for all.
The work of the Finnish educator, Dr Marjo Kyllönen, on the challenges of defining “us” in a more complex global society underpins the reasons why international schools are the micro building blocks, demonstrating that there is no false binary choice between a local and a global identity.
The international schools of which I am director in Moldova illustrate the crucial importance of leadership in internationalising schools. Heritage International School is the first international school in Moldova to provide an international curriculum from K-12.
“We want future generations to make better and long-lasting decisions for our common humanity.”
Moldova has a complex, post-Soviet legacy and sits at the crossroads of Europe. The founders’ mission in setting up Heritage is: “To prepare students for the challenges of the future. A dream of an international school that will give the children of our country the atmosphere of an alternative, progressive and modern educational institution”.
We use this mission as our guiding light as school leaders to make sure our operational and strategic priorities always lead to these words, and the ethos and the culture of an international school in our mindsets, classrooms and corridors.
We want future generations to make better and long-lasting decisions for our common humanity. That is the prize and why we are in international education. Our young people need to be proud of who they are and as global citizens. There is no false binary choice here if we develop and prepare our global learners for life in school and beyond. This takes courage but is worth fighting for in our international education.
A longer version of this article first appeared in the Spring 2021 edition of International School Magazine.