Michele Marquet, Acting Head of School

Dear Parents and Carers,

We have witnessed tremendous joy recently as the whole School celebrated the Spring Festival. The week started with a bang as our HSC and IB Drama students performed their Drama set group and individual pieces for an audience. Wide-ranging in style, both creative and challenging, these performances left the audience feeling so impressed. Those attending the HSC & IB Music Composition Showcase last Monday evening were also captivated by the range and quality of the music pieces composed by our Year 12 students. At the Junior School on Thursday afternoon, amazing musical performances were heard from our younger students who had diligently prepared their pieces on a wide variety of instruments. Last Thursday evening, our HSC and IB students again showcased their brilliant Visual Arts Body of Works at the annual Y12 Arts Exhibition. The variety of artworks and the innovative usage of traditional and non-traditional materials was truly impressive. Friday night saw the instrument and vocal competition take place across seven venues at the Senior School. This week, those attending enjoyed brilliant and broad variety of musical performances on show at the HSC & IB Music Performance evening. At all these events, the audience was made up of proud families and, pleasingly, so many other Cranbrook students who had come along to support, cheer and celebrate the creativity and skill of their peers. Their warm genuine appreciation and support of the talents of others was palpable. And it is not quite over yet! We have the TAS HSC & IB Body of Work Exhibition coming up on 17 September and the Music Competition Finals Recital on 18 September.

The breadth and quality of the dramatic and musical performances alongside the impressive range of artworks viewed reminded me of how our students truly live out the ideal of a liberal education. In a world that increasingly encourages us to specialise early, our students model our philosophy that a better preparation for whatever career you enter involves genuine breadth of engagement across all areas of learning. It also is the surest pathway to becoming a well-balanced, well-rounded and interesting human being.

KPMG produced a thought-provoking paper a few years ago on the Future of Education in Australia that highlighted the need for a multi-disciplinary skillset:

Australia won’t have the skills mix it needs unless we include the humanities and social sciences. What they provide is the ability to think critically, collaboratively and creatively. They assist with cross-cultural understanding in organisations and they create resilience and curiosity in people. Students entering the work force in the next 10-12 years must be adept at collaboration, communication and problem-solving, which are some of the skills developed through social and emotional learning (SEL). Coupled with mastery of traditional skills, social and emotional proficiency will equip students to succeed in the swiftly evolving digital economy.

Professor John Fitzgerald The Future of Education in Australia

It is not about Maths or Science instead of English or History or Languages instead of Sport. Indeed, it is clear that knowledge and skills across all these subject disciplines are what the workplace of the future is going to need. The most complex problems are frequently solved by those who can think outside the box of their field of expertise or specialisation. Future workplaces will need people who can see the principles underpinning one thing and where it might be applied to another setting to solve a problem. To do that you need to have learnt about concepts, skills, content and principles across a broad range of subject areas and disciplines.

The value of a breadth in education is increasingly supported by research. There is no doubt that a deep and balanced education that incorporates regular high-quality experiences in the arts helps develop more interesting, rounded adults. But it does much more than that. It is fascinating that research shows that English, Mathematics and Science skills and their development are enhanced significantly by quality sequential teaching of the arts, PDHPE and languages. A simple example is the well-known fact that learning a musical instrument is closely aligned to stronger mathematical learning. This research has been common knowledge for many years. You may be less aware that research also shows that this type of learning has the power to improve literacy skills significantly, particularly comprehension of more complex texts.

There are copious examples of the value of one subject area on learning in another discipline. The more we learn about the way our brain works and how we learn, the clearer it is that the impact of learning how to do one thing or about one thing, is not that simple. It seems everything is interconnected. Learning how to handwrite impacts our spelling development; learning poetry or play lines off by heart exercises our brains in a particular way that helps with cognitive processing in many other areas. Development of fundamental movement skills in PE helps younger children with tracking in their reading. Studying aspects of Science, Geography and History, should build factual knowledge, but such study also helps students develop empathy and the capacity to see other perspectives.  Breadth allows the development of those inter-personal skills so highly valued by our future work world and ensures an understanding beyond a narrow field of interest.

Cranbrook will always advocate for breadth with depth; in other words, a liberal education – broadly educated humans have a love and knowledge of many areas of learning and that is what our world still needs. Understanding across many disciplines is one of the best gifts we can give our children and the surest foundation for success in a future world we cannot fully predict.

Kind wishes,

Michele Marquet
Acting Head of School