Principal's Report

This term at Matthew Flinders we are focusing on our important trait of optimism...              

Michael Lerner comments:

So many have now internalised society’s cynicism and are too scared to allow themselves - or us- to hope for a different world… We accept that nothing can ever be different, so we give up on social change and just focus on getting as much as we can for ourselves…

BUT, there is a tremendous hunger for a different kind of world, a world in which loving and caring could really be the bottom line.

That is the kind of vision and sense of unfailing optimism that we want to pass on to our students here at MFG. 

Optimism, like pessimism, is largely a learned behaviour. From our earliest years we can gather from the way our parents look at the world a sense of hope and a sense of mission and purpose. Conversely, some children learn from the home environment that negativity is a useful weapon of power. They discover that they get more attention by being pessimistic and they soon learn to skilfully manipulate pessimism’s many siblings – fear, whingeing, gloom, hate - to their own advantage. 

There are forms of optimism, too, that we need to avoid displaying and passing on to our children, such as a narcissistic or self- centred optimism that basically encourages you to spend most of your time happily looking after yourself. There is also a deceptive optimism which refuses to admit that anything could be wrong and results in people habitually lying to each other. Then there is a shallow optimism, the ‘Pollyanna’ kind, which won’t face reality, that can’t think of anything constructive to do and just hopes that it will all turn out right. Those forms of optimism can be quite destructive. 

We want to embrace a different kind of optimism that provokes us to be always looking beyond ourselves to see something better for the world – hope, peace, justice, compassion, kindness, forgiveness; that encourages us to be part, even in very small ways, of making it happen. 

This is the kind of optimism that 12 of our students were trying to capture in their interpretation of this trait during their work with the artist Carla Mcrae. 

Michelle Crofts

Principal 

Matthew Flinders Girls Secondary College