Increasingly isolated in an increasingly interconnected world!

Most of us over 30 will remember the experience of running out the door first thing in the morning to hang out with friends all day. You will recall ‘play’ that relied on imagination and popping back to the house, sometimes all together in one house for lunch and treats to keep you fuelled for the activities before going home when the streetlights came on.

Our experiences allowed us to not only engage in something that was great fun but also nurtured our creativity, imagination, and resilience. It taught us about developing relationships, and overcoming challenges, and enabled us to grow a sense of relational self.

Rainy days felt like life sentences, confining us to a house that felt like a jail cell. We missed being outdoors, but what we missed was sharing experiences with our friends, that were not controlled by our parents. That sense of beingness!

At some point in the intervening years, culture began to frown upon this freedom and started to see the outdoors as dangerous. As something we needed protection from.

At the same time, the growth of technology, phones, tablets, game consoles, and social media, made keeping children ‘safely’ indoors much easier. Something which has now become so normalised many forget to question it, and most children don’t remember a time before it. Algorithms behind social media are sorting us into groups of like-minded individuals. They create virtual bubbles that amplify our views and leave us insulated from divergent perspectives; they homogenise opinions while polarising our societies.

We have connected them to the world at the very moment we have removed them from it. Amplifying their world of possibility whilst augmenting their feelings of isolation!

But proper brain maturity, the necessary synapse connections, nervous system development, healthy bonding experiences, understanding relationships, learning how to overcome challenges, creativity, expression, and positive mental health, happen and are developed through play, exploration, and being in nature.

Schools have a duty to help students to think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. We need to support our students develop a strong sense of right and wrong, a sensitivity to the claims that others make about us and the world, and to challenge the limits of individual and collective action. If we want our students to actively contribute to civic and social life, we must help them develop a deep understanding of how others live, in different cultures and traditions, and importantly how others think.

Digital technologies, globalisation, conflict, and artificial can change and disrupt economic and social structures, but outcomes are not predetermined. It is the nature of our collective responses that determines these outcomes.

The OECD is clear in that we need a comprehensive and multidimensional approach to growing a ‘global’ competence in our young people—one where schools, teachers, parents, and the environment all have an important role to play.

One of the most interesting findings from their work is that certain activities, such as the nature of how we learn at school, contact with people from other cultures, learning other languages, and a connection to the environment, are positively associated with a variety of skills, including the ability to examine local and global issues, perspective taking, intercultural communication and, ultimately, the ability to take action for the betterment of the societies we live in.

Countries and organisations that will be successful in fostering global knowledge, addressing modern skill development, and being able to grow the attitudes and values among their students needed to navigate and be successful in our world, are those that combine several factors. Environmental learning opportunities for students, an adapted curriculum, teachers who are prepared to teach global competence, availability of opportunities to learn foreign languages, availability of opportunities to have contact with people from other cultures, and, finally, a positive and inclusive school environment, all add value to this mission.

This is one of the varied reasons I am so thrilled to be taking the helm with Education in Motion (EIM) at Hochalpines Institut Ftan (HIF) Swiss International Boarding School and Sports Academy. An open-hearted campus community where young people from all over the globe have the opportunity to thrive in the health-giving environment of the Swiss Alps, HIF epitomizes the advice from the OECD. With inclusion, multilingualism, innovation, interculturalism, sport, and an incredible environment stimulating a high moral and academic ecosystem, HIF’s young people are afforded the chance to create meaningful and sustainable change in their interconnected world!

They are educated as education should be, and as education needs to be.

Emma Nolan ?? ???? ????? Claire Crew ???? ??? BSc (Hons), PGCE Jon Peer Dr Helen Wright Christopher Nourse - Grewal d'Arcy Lunn Eimear McKenna Singh Education in Motion Russell John Cailey Lee Howell Charlotte Borghesi Joseph Kotarski, Ed.D. Michael Wilson