Interview
As a professional educator with many years of
leadership experience in well-reputed schools
in Botswana, Wales, and the United States you have
had access to many resources that allowed you to
operate. At Keystone, you will also have access to many
resources. We can accept the feasibility of your idea to
build Keystone into a world school because you have
the resources necessary to make this happen. But you
have mentioned that any school, even those without
many resources such as a village school, can become
a world school. Can you please elaborate on this?
Q:
great resources but they have a will and an attitude that is very
open and impressive. In that school, which is an English-medium
school because it is in Australia, they are teaching Chinese and
Vietnamese to young kids in grades 1-3. Not because they have
a particular program or they have the money to do that, but
because they have teachers in their school who come from China
and Vietnam. They are using those resources to do something
very different from the other primary schools in that city. That
is the kind of attitude that allows you to use whatever you have,
whatever is available, to do something different, to do something
more open than just focusing on one country. That is why I think
it is possible to have great teaching and learning, great world
teaching and learning, quite literally under a tree.
A:
Going back into antiquity, if you think about the great sages, they
were people who for the most part were world-minded. They saw
life in a very broad way. They were able to rise above their time,
location, village, country, and culture. And see things in a much
wider perspective. My country is the world and the world is my
country. This is the kind of attitude that we are talking about. If
you have that attitude then you can offer a world education even
with minimal resources.
Let us ask about Keystone first. Is Keystone going to
become a world school? Yes, but it is not going to be easy
even with the resources that we have. This is our ambition. It will
not be easy to achieve simply because we have resources, and a
wonderful building; we need great people with the right attitudes.
When I think about a world school, it entails building attitudes
amongst the teachers and students that are open and flexible
and global. And if you have that attitude you can be a world
school even if you have resources that are far less than we have
at Keystone. And there are schools that have great resources that
are not world schools because they are focused on very narrow
things. I just happened to be watching the other day a news
report on a primary school in Melbourne, Australia, which has a
principal and some teachers who are really focused on offering
the best of world education to their students. They do not have
“…if you have that attitude you can
be a World School…”
Malcolm McKenzie at an team meeting
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The Keystone Magazine