Message from Michele Marquet, Acting Head of School
Dear Parents and Carers
This past week has seen our Year 4 and Year 6 students head off to their annual camps in the Shoalhaven and on the Colo River, respectively, and shortly, our Year 7 students will travel to Namadgi National Park, near Canberra, for their first CITF experience. Year 9 have their CITF before the end of this term.
Experiential education is one important way for our students to ‘discover and make the most of their talents.’ For all humans, embracing new environments, being slightly out of our comfort zone and testing our problem-solving skills in partnership with others are vital ways to come to understand ourselves and to foster genuine resilience – particularly, as we grow up.
Cranbrook has always had a significant focus on the needs of the individual, yet our Mission statement also finishes with the following: that our students will come to ‘lead adventurous, courageous and generous lives which contribute to the betterment of society.’
It is vital that as a school community, we appreciate the difference between celebrating individuality, and individualism that consistently promotes the wants and needs of a person over those of our society. At Cranbrook, we strongly advocate that we should be trying to instil in our children the idea of knowing who they are, but at the same time how they are going to contribute to the world and help create a better society, as a result of that. Humans have indeed been created for relationships with other people, and that brings an incontrovertible need to care for people with compassion. Our School strongly affirms that a love of the self and the love of neighbour need not be mutually exclusive.
Cranbrook’s focus on experiential education challenges students to look beyond the self. After experiencing a series of increasingly challenging camps as they move up the year levels in Junior School, our Senior School students take part in CITF – Cranbrook in The Field. Delivered by Outward Bound Australia, with the essential participation of members of our staff, it carries the flag for experiential education as a balance to some of the more enticing, but superficial and misleading elements of contemporary culture.
Like the International Baccalaureate, Outward Bound springs from the thinking of educationalist Kurt Hahn who, in a very different time, saw the value of searching within, in order to see beyond selfhood. Hahn’s own personal experiences led him to pioneer experiential education. He said, “I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an indefatigable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all, compassion.”
Another particularly powerful way of understanding ourselves as well as others comes through our longstanding CETOP programme, which allows our students and community an authentic and practical experience of what it is to be globally minded. Past Headmaster, Jeremy Madin, believed that “The work of CETOP is one of the best things about Cranbrook School. It is quintessentially about valuing and serving others, without patronising and with tremendous generosity of spirit.”
Annually, some of our Year 6 students embark on a trip to Nepal to support the communities there and students in the Senior School have the option to travel to Ladakh to support the communities and our work in India. Students in the Senior School also can opt to travel to Central Australia or Arnhem Land to experience indigenous culture in these unique contexts. Students’ feedback on return from tours such as these consistently reveals the lifechanging impact of such experiences. They share how the trip helped them appreciate more fully what they have back at home, but also how it challenged them to wonder if contentedness in life is possibly not linked to the things we possess. Such lived experiences can powerfully breakdown pre-conceived notions of what other cultures and people are truly like, and what our purpose in life might be.
Our students’ opportunities to experience Junior School camps, CETOP and outback Australian tours, as well as CITF, help Cranbrook to offer a genuinely broad, balanced liberal education, which can truly help our students become adults who go on to ‘lead adventurous, courageous and generous lives which contribute to the betterment of society’. Thank you to the amazing staff across the Junior and Senior Schools who go above and beyond to organise, support and attend these experiences with their students, so as to ensure they take place and the young people attending grow in character as humans through the process. Away from their own families for extended periods of time, we are exceptionally grateful for their generosity and commitment to the power and impact of experiential education.
We look forward to another productive week ahead.
Michele Marquet
Acting Head of School