January 7, 2016
My alarm comes on to the sounds of the 5:00 a.m. news from National Public Radio on WAMU 88.5. The day-after-day leading stories have me wondering whether I ought to change the station.
Yesterday morning I woke to something along the lines of "Kim Jong Un...North Korea...hydrogen bomb." Add to the mix startling 40-degree temps at the North Pole, Saudi Arabia and Iran in a diplomatic spat, a slump in Asian markets prompted by a slowing economy in China. Could we get a little happy news?
I suspect few if any of our students listen to NPR at 5:00 a.m. Nor would it surprise if many students barely noticed these events taking place half a world away. However, it is undeniable that it is a mark of our times that the means to communicate and be communicated with about complex issues from the farthest reaches of our planet are with us so long as we have the phone nearby. As much as we may treasure the safety and comfort of our Good Counsel community it seems the need to get our students to pay attention on a global scale is more important than it ever has been.
The downside of not doing so is, of course, to risk developing an insular and complacent point of view. Today, at Good Counsel we are working hard to lead our students to a deeper appreciation of their role as global citizens. We believe the Good Counsel graduate must be prepared to contribute meaningfully to a better world, and it is heartening to see we are making headway in raising international-mindedness among our students. The service trips to El Salvador and the cultural trip to Europe each Easter continue to fill up fast. Our community has embraced the 15 diploma-seeking students from China, and the quality of their contributions in all facets of school life make us proud. A relatively new class, AP Human Geography, challenges students to grapple with the global complexities of climate, infrastructure, population, resource allocation, diplomacy and more.
Looking ahead, we have offered admission to students from Iran and Colombia for next year. We have made an initial pitch for our domestic students to consider a study trip to China. We are negotiating with schools in Spain, Australia and New Zealand for month-long exchanges.
These all seem like ways to expose students to the world beyond Olney, MoCo, Maryland, and the US. Our students benefit from coming to understand that the Good Counsel way is not the only way, even when a school looks remarkably like ours. A mundane example emerged earlier this week when we talked with a representative of Pymble Ladies' College in Sydney, Australia. Our approach to athletics tends to be ruthless; you make Varsity or JV, or you can forget about it. At PLC, they want everyone to play, and so they have more than twenty field hockey teams. That's a significant cultural difference in how each school understands the place of athletics in a student's growth.
Putting on a lens and seeing differently, what the sociologists refer to as "making the familiar strange and the strange familiar," is consistent with the Xaverian values that animate our school. Exposure to new faces and places and experiences and traditions promotes deeper understanding and, I hope, deeper engagement with what it will take to solve the problems of our world. And maybe contribute to some happy news for me at 5:00 a.m.