Head of School Speech in English

Dear parents, guardians, grandparents and the Class of 2021

It gives me great pleasure and pride to be trusted with the role to offer you, the graduate class of 2021 some advisory words that might influence decisions you are about to make. Decisions with potential consequences that may last a lifetime. It is an honour to have this privilege, and I have taken this challenge very seriously. Those of you who know me well know that I am rarely lost for words and relatively quick in the art of writing articles, letter and speeches. The weight and importance of this speech are intimidating to the point that I am here writing about the speech rather than writing the speech!

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” Pericles (495-429 BCE)

Class of 2021, you are graduating at a remarkable moment, singular in human history. At the time you graduate, the front pages of newspapers are dominated by a narrative of crises. The multiple crises derive their menacing statuses from their international nature. Environmental catastrophe, nuclear accident threats and viral pandemic do not respect national borders. Understanding these threats, developing solutions, persuading an entire population to adopt new habits, disseminating new ideas across national boundaries, and advocating for political reforms require a special kind of leadership. 

Above all, you are graduating as an IB diploma student, one of the most academic and emotionally demanding programmes on offer. As an ISL IB Diploma student, you have also enjoyed the exclusive opportunity to study in a truly international environment, make friends for life with distinct cultures, speak different languages and experienced contrasting family histories. Your experience of the world has been more vivid, the stories more diverse than that of most of the world population. You have a deep insight into the meaning of international mindedness. 

Furthermore, you are graduating with a deep understanding of multiple cultural habits; you are proficient in at least two languages. You studied and researched subjects with a global focus in mind. You are accustomed to working both independently and collaboratively. Through the service-learning and CAS activities, you have acquired a phenomenological understanding of inequities in the world; through the mother tongue programme, you developed a robust sense of identity that helps you feel at ease in many parts of this world, whilst feeling well-grounded with your cultural roots. Class of 2021, you are graduating as genuine world-class global citizens with all the qualities one requires to face the challenges of global proportions.  

If these were not sufficient reasons to celebrate your graduation and vesting you with so much hope in the promising success of your chosen career, you are also singular thanks to a conflation of events that have catapulted you to the centre of the most radical educational transformation in decades.  

Just like the rest of society, ISL Qatar had to make frequent adjustments in response to the growing hidden sanitary threat of global proportions. Whilst your teachers and your parents were re-inventing the new normal with the view to safeguarding your academic and emotional development, I was busy making sense of this new order, making sense of the context in which you are graduating today. 

At the time of your graduation, life as we know it has been re-invented and while you were completing your diploma programme, you were also helping us transform, re-evaluate, discard and re-invent educational parameters. I would like you to comprehend the central role you have played in this revolutionary process. 

Thus, amidst the physical and cognitive turbulence you have encountered during the DP courses, you exceeded expectations by leading the way and modelling successful learning strategies that will dominate the educational landscape for generations to come. Your success we are celebrating today symbolises the triumph of human ingenuity, adaptability and creativity. For these reasons alone, this class of 2021 occupies a prominent role in the contemporary history of humankind.

The advent of the pandemic brought to the forefront of our thoughts, aspects of education that hitherto rested at the margin. Until very recently, soft skills were taken for granted and often dismissed in a derogatory manner. Creativity, curiosity, civic-mindedness, solidarity, self-discipline, self-confidence, compassion, empathy, self-awareness, resilience, humility and the list goes on…

Adapting a math test to an online version was a relatively easy step thanks to technology – fostering curiosity or sustaining resilience remotely takes us to another challenging level. We educators could not have done it without the young adults, a digital-native generation, experts who are IT literate and social media masters.

As you began your IB Diploma journey, you entered an institution through a well-established education door furnished by a well-recognised curriculum programme that abides by a consecrated and respected pre-university preparation system. You emerge today at the end of a two-year course that bears little resemblance with that traditional programme. This is because the curriculum programme, the delivery of the programme, the learning of this programme as well as the way in which you were assessed were radically transformed. More importantly, you helped us to re-calibrate the core values of education: the very purpose of our role in facilitating your academic journey. 

There will be years, perhaps decades before you, the class of 2021, and I will be able to gauge the depth of impact you have had as the protagonist in this transformation, and I shall leave here these words in the guise of testimony for the historical record.

Back in 1932, the renowned and influential American Educator, George Counts, proclaimed that “education is the one unfailing remedy for every ill to which [we are] subject … war, poverty…injustice”. Wise words in defence of the value of education. The recent sanitary crisis indicates that, from time to time, one must reformulate the remedies so that education remains a potent medication to fight new stronger strands of society illnesses. 

Who would have conceived that the new revolution in education would have had the students at the centre of the transformation, particularly our class of 2021? 

It was you that had the privilege to fully experience a new form of education—participating on an equal level of technical and technological expertise. 

Consequently, you and your teachers co-constructed the new learning and teaching, laying the grounds for greater parity of roles, re-defined learning autonomy, and invented new conceptions of personalised learning. The degree of freedom to learn at the diploma level during these two years was unprecedented, and you demonstrated a level of maturity and capability to handle these responsibilities. The success of your academic performance demanded scrutiny of many of our prejudices about schooling, supervision, and the direction we take.

Class of 2021 will be imprinted in the memory of ISL Qatar and the wider professional community as the group of students that modelled true learning partnership to co-construct a new school reality suitable to mirror the new world order. 

I want to tell you that you have made it! Not like any previous graduate class, you made it through the most convoluted academic year. You had to circumvent obstacles that hitherto belonged in science fiction stories, demonstrate a high level of critical thinking to navigate through an educational system that seemed constantly changing, manage ambiguous sets of information and made decisions before having sufficient information at your disposal. 

Incidentally, this is an accurate description of the real world outside schools, and that is the world we teachers aspired to prepare you for. The world out there could not wait for you, the unique, exceptional circumstances brought the messiness of the real world into the school and into our homes. 

After seven decades of global prosperity, proportionated by scientific and technological developments, the planet Earth sent some strong signals that our prosperity was at the expense of the planets capacity to sustain life. Climate disasters of global proportions became more frequent and furious, the social inequity has also accentuated, and the divide between rich and emerging countries became more evident.

Just before you have begun your IB diploma journey, global unrests were intermittent. You may recall the global financial crisis of 2008, or the Arab Spring, the mega forest fires in multiple continents, just to mention a few events that rippled across the globe. These turbulences of global proportions broadcasted at the speed of light thanks to technological advancements led to radical changes in the world order. Disfranchised electoral populations worldwide replaced traditional leaders with those claimed to represent a new route and a route to a past that no longer existed. While you were busy preparing to enter the IB Diploma and thinking about your future, the political world’s response to a planet that was no longer able to sustain the rate to the exploitation of its resource was radical, sectarian, divisive. Across the world, we elected extremists, nationalistic, anti-globalist, or we ignored the earth signals.

At that point, you began your IB diploma courses; the planet earth gives it the strongest signal yet that the election extreme political parties were not an adequate response to global threats. The signal came in the form of a microscopic virus.

In a relatively short time, the displaced protagonists of the seven decades of prosperity, the scientists and technologist, regained centre stage. Today, by the time you are graduating, the world seems to have recovered some good sense. We have developed new social habits, we have a sophisticated vocabulary and understanding of safety protocols, and we have learned to work and learn in multiple places. 

Quite simply, we had experienced a social transformation of global proportions, the last of which only your great grandparents had experienced when they were younger than you. 

It is in this context that your generation occupies a special place in the history of humankind. You lived through the sharpest threat to our species. As digital natives, you have appropriated the technological tools, adapted easily, and assisted both the younger and older generations to transition. In this way, your CAS contribution was unique and significant, albeit undocumented. With limited information, as if you were on a battlefield, you were asked to reconceive your future plans and explore alternative opportunities. 

You had to be patient and flexible while your teachers received multiple incongruent information; you were asked to adapt as the goalposts were moving just as expected of exceptional leaders. 

I am not exaggerating when I stand here today in front of you to claim that you are an exceptional graduating class who already proved to be self-reliant. 

It would not be surprising if in 10 years you will be referred to as that special generation, the COVID generation, meaning highly flexible, incredibly creative, and a very adaptive generation. 

With so many qualities bestowed upon you, I am afraid higher expectations will follow and, should you aim to meet some of these expectations, you will be destined to lead changes of global impact. 

I began my speech influenced by Pericles’ words from ancient times. He alerted us back then that active participation in society is not an option. My job is completed today – you are ready to become an agent for change at a global level.

And I finish this speech quoting a philosopher of education that continues to influence my thoughts, Paulo Freire. Once, he claimed that “education does not transform the world. Education changes people. People change the world.” 

Congratulations, class of 2021; you are ready to shape our future.