What Is Goodness?
As we approach this season of celebration, family and reflection I’ve been looking back over the past year with curiosity. On the one hand it has been a whirlwind. When we purchased Glenburnie School we knew that we were acquiring a school with a well-earned reputation and a place of honour in the Oakville community. At the same time we recognized that change can be uncomfortable for everyone involved. In particular, we knew that our parent community would expect reassurance that their children would be accorded the same level of care they had been accustomed to.
We were determined to bring our unique and established approach to educating young people to bear. This required some careful thought as we sought to introduce new thinking within an established environment.
Our work took on many facets and one of those was figuring out what was genuinely different about Walden International School.
It was our good fortune to have inherited faculty and staff who were committed to many of the same values we possess. This allowed us to approach introducing change in a spirit of collaboration and community.
As we worked through defining what genuinely differentiates our school we learned that central to our core purpose was our collective determination to make good people.
“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.” - Anne Frank
Making Good People
Making Good People has generated some interesting outcomes even in our classrooms. Just last week in a Grade 2 Design class the teacher assigned the class a task to design a poster to promote Walden. One of the students came up with all kinds of benefits - teachers are awesome, we can make cool friends, lots of bathrooms(!) - and his headline was Making Good People. This young fellow thought that was a great reason to come to our school.
It has also generated some discussion about exactly what we think goodness is. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle this subject has engaged people in deeply philosophical musings.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, while taking slightly different approaches, determined that a good person has the following characteristics:
Virtue: They must be morally virtuous.
Health: They should enjoy good health and reasonably long life.
Prosperity: They should be comfortably off.
Friendship: They must have good friends.
Respect: They should enjoy the respect of others - a person’s qualities and achievements will be recognized by others.
Engagement: They must exercise their uniquely human abilities and capacities.*
IB Programme
Interestingly, these characteristics synchronize smoothly with our IB Learner Profile. Within the IB programme we create an environment and lead students to be, among other things, inquirers, thinkers, communicators, principled and open-minded people who are caring, reflective and balanced.
These attributes, coupled with the characteristics of a good person inform our approach to making good people and just like that young lad in Grade 2, we think that’s a pretty good reason to come to Walden.
Finally, all of us at Walden wish you a holiday season full of goodness and we thank you for the confidence you’ve shown in our team.