“Man, man your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea”
I have always been drawn to romanticised and fictional versions of the past, in this case Al Stewart singing about Nostradamus (and I acknowledge the gender specificity), but for the past few (blog free) weeks, I have been engaged in writing some real history. I’ve been writing the story of the first 50 years of the United World College of South East Asia and it has been a pleasure and a privilege to be afforded the opportunity to look at the life of an institution from its beginnings to the present moment; to look at a college whose life has paralleled almost exactly the growth of its host country.
The experience, for me, has been one of huge growth and learning – learning about myself, learning about history, reflecting about how the present and the future are linked to the past; but understanding, too, that neither have to be its victim. I will explain.
Although I studied and taught history for many years, it has been a long time since I could make any claim to being an historian. Despite imminently producing what will be, in its way, a history book, that fact will not alter. I started to study history because I loved it – and the past few weeks have helped me to remember where that love came from. I catch myself watching 1971 on Apple TV or Age of Samurai on Netflix and I am transfixed. Looking back at the story of a school has been equally fixating. The revelationary aspect of it is the creeping understanding of why something turned into something else, how change happened when significant events approached each other from different directions and collided.
In European history, the Enlightenment, the rise of scientific thought, new methods of production, the discovery and then dependency on new markets and new resources, the decline of faith, the emergence of nation states, the armed race for land and to war…all these things were connected and consequential and the consequences of all of these things are still being visited upon conquered and colonised countries today. Behind the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, behind that, the rise of Islam and the fall of Constantinople, the rise and fall of the Roman empire…you can go back and and back and all of the dominoes connect.
The birth of the United World College of South East Asia happened 50 years ago when three stars collided to create an event. The British withdrew unexpectedly from Singapore because of a financial crisis at home; the remaining British expatriates in Singapore suddenly had no school for their children; and a radical group of educational pioneers, who had recently started an unprecedented international school in a castle in Wales, came looking for a place to set up a second school in Asia. Without any one of these constituents: no UWCSEA as we know it today.
I said earlier that the future does not have to be the victim of the past and, thus far, I might be giving exactly the opposite impression. If you’re familiar with the work of Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute (highly recommended) you will know where I’m going next. In Scharmer’s Theory U, there are two ways for leaders to learn. Learning from the past and learning from the future. Presencing is the moment in which we reach clarity about the emerging future that runs from the past, through our present. It is the moment that we recognise where that road is going, where it will take us and the moment we decide whether what we see is the future we want to have. With awareness, we have the choice to make interventions to create something better. All leaders have this choice.
What does it look like? It looks like Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, understanding that the nascent United World College movement wanted to build a second sea school in the image of the first one. He foresaw that this wouldn’t serve the interests of his country and so diverted the path of history away from the coast and into the former British Army School on Dover Road. It looks like Steve Jobs deciding that people needed a ‘Volkswagen’ computer rather than an IBM. It looks like the football manager who sees the way the game is going and brings on a substitute to alter the result.
To accomplish this, as a leader, you need a deep knowledge of why things are the way they are, before you can decide which elements are exerting positive or negative influences on your preferred future. And you must build this insight quickly, without taking so long that you simply become part of the flow of time, its prisoner, unable to exert the influence that is necessary. One of my Uncle Bob’s favourite one-liners about history was that there’s no future in it – it still makes me smile to think about him saying it – but he wasn’t serious and he wasn’t right.
The tall battle flags that wave above educational debates at the moment – decolonising the curriculum, diversity, equity, inclusion, these are all consequences of past failures to see the emerging future and to deal with it…more cynically they are the result of ruling societies deliberately allowing the past to flow into the future untrammelled.
Today, we stand astride the present and speak of the future of online digital learning, the clamour loud and insistent for this to be the next train we ride – but the emergent future for digital learning is a sharply increased disenfranchisement of those without access to technology. Is this the future we want? Until governments and corporations decide that it’s time that education becomes a universal entitlement for all children, in accordance with Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, education leaders are left with some big choices to make.
When do we own and determine the future? When we let go of the limiting stories of the past – what our parents stopped us becoming, what society didn’t give us, what the last Head of Department messed up, how it’s just the way it is. The way it is, is the way we make it and we make good schools, good businesses, good teams, good relationships, good decisions by spending the time to understand why and how things are and reflecting on what things will become if we continue on the present course. We’re all pretty clear about that at a global level, aren’t we? Catastrophe. So the macro and the micro choices are ours – if the emerging future doesn’t look so good, we need to change it. The past gives us all the information that we need.
