Headmaster's
Message
Worldview
President Trump said in his inauguration speech, “What we do here is a lot more important than who we are.” I couldn’t disagree more. Who we are is so much more important than what we do, or what we can do, because who we are affects how we see the world, which then has a profound impact on what we do.
We each see the world in very different ways as though we each view life through our own, very different set of glasses. These glasses are constructed from our strong beliefs, the things in which we place our faith, as well as our fears and our natural dispositions. Our glasses operate at the unconscious and subconscious level, influencing our thinking and our choices. We forget we are wearing them.
We cannot help but live with our glasses on. We are wearing our glasses when we relate to others, parent our children and go to work or school. Our glasses are our own unique worldview that informs and affects our internal dialogue, our values, as well as how we perceive, understand, interpret and interact with the world. Our worldview is integral to our identity. It is how we get through our days and how we have learned to cope with our lives and hopefully thrive. Our worldview works – kind of! Even when it doesn’t work, we don’t know any other way, so we persist.
Of course, teachers too wear their glasses to work. For this reason, educational settings and the learning teachers facilitate is not neutral. Underpinning each approach to education is a particular worldview – in our case, a traditional worldview with Christian roots. This worldview is framed with the universe as an intelligent and intelligible creation, where all that happens has meaning. This meaning is the source of our Faith, Hope and Love, and also the ground of our Purpose and Integrity.
The worldview that prevails in many educational settings is not as formalised or as organised and can be denied or ignored, however it is just as real. Much of education is built on a modern worldview that holds that what is real is that which can be known by science and that the physical senses are our only way of knowing. Modernists typically turn their backs on the wisdom of the past. Postmodernism further develops an attitude of scepticism or distrust of grand narratives and ideologies and challenges the existence of objective reality and absolute truth. It is difficult in such an environment to know quite where Faith, Hope, Love, Purpose and Integrity fit in and on what they can be grounded.
Blue Mountains Grammar School students are each developing a worldview. They are gradually making sense of everything they have heard and seen and thought. They are trying to piece these things together in a comprehensible manner to formulate a cohesive worldview. However, where they have yet to make sense of their world, they have no choice but to live with the mess of ideas in their head and heart; just like we do. As the adults in these young people’s lives, we should be having the kinds of conversations with them that enable them to make sense of their world. However, we should also be having the types of conversations that grow in them the mental and moral equipment to make sense of the world for themselves.
Mr Ian Maynard
Headmaster
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