The following vision address was delivered by Director of Education, Geoff Cohen, to the entire Herzlia staff contingent on 8 October, 2008.
I am really proud to be standing here today as Director of Education of the United Herzlia Schools with its rich heritage and proud record of excellence in such a wide range of areas. Indeed I believe that we can all feel justifiably proud of what Herzlia stands for and the excellent reputation it has not only in the Jewish community but also in the broader community of Cape Town and South Africa.
In discussing the format of this morning’s procedures we came to the decision that every member of the Herzlia staff should be included and I am really excited that we have managed to achieve this. Both educators and support staff are here this morning, some 420 people all part of the Herzlia family and all part of the awesome responsibility of educating our youth.
We are one Herzlia, one team, one family, all with the same goal and all with the same sense of ownership and belonging. This is what makes an institution great – complete buy-in and ownership of the core responsibilities and vision of the institution.
When President Kennedy gave the mandate to NASA to put a man on the moon, that objective initiated the expenditure of thousands of employees, millions of dollars and billions of man hours. One day a janitor sweeping the floor at NASA was asked to describe his job, his response, “putting a man on the moon”. He was indeed part of the team. He felt connected and had a sense of being part of the team. Just as his job of sweeping the floor contributed to putting a man on the moon so too can each of you sitting in this room this morning contribute to improving the educational process and in so doing make Herzlia an even better school than it is today.
It is clear to me that the reasons for Herzlia’s success are the teachers and support staff who come to work each morning in order to make a difference in the lives of our children. All of you sitting together in this hall this morning are responsible for educating our youth and for ensuring that when they eventually leave the safe and secure environment of Herzlia they will be able to enter the real world as well rounded, decent, creative and enthusiastic members of a new and exciting global society.
What an awesome responsibility this is. What profession could be more important, more fulfilling and more rewarding than this? We are in the business of shaping the future by shaping the youth. We are the custodians of the future and we have to ensure that our students leave Herzlia with all the tools necessary to help them become citizens of this new world wherein we find ourselves.
The big question is: are we doing enough? Are we actually educating our youth for the world that they will live in 10 or 20 years down the line? Are we ensuring that what we teach our children today will be relevant when they are looking for their first jobs? Are we doing our job with creativity and foresight? Are we thinking laterally enough? Are we able to change and are we prepared to change? Are we the best we can possibly be?
I believe we could be even better IF we:
- initiated and embraced change more readily.
- worked more collaboratively
- embraced inclusion completely and all that it encompasses
- used technology more creatively in the classroom
- extended our own learning and self development
- infused our children with the love of learning
- and took more risks
We want our children to leave Herzlia with the ability to deal with the world as it will be then not what it is right now.
The world that our children will work in will be very different from the world as it is today:
- 10 years ago if I said that I would Google you I would be looked at with disgust.
- If I asked for a skinny white regular decaf latte you would have thought I was crazy.
- 5 years ago there was no FaceBook – The website currently has more than 100 million active users world-wide.
- Today’s world consists of 3G phones, online banking, ticket less airlines, digital photography, e-bay and online shopping, you tube and high definition TV.
- More text messages are sent each day than the entire population of the planet. (6.7b)
- In 2006 there were 39.66 million cell phone users in South Africa.
- Around 1,400,000 UK school pupils have their own web pages.
- There are over 130,000,000 registered MySpace users.
- BBC estimates that a new blog is created in the UK every second.
- In the UK, 70% of teenagers have a handheld games console, 90% have a home computer and a mobile phone while 70% of teachers have NEVER played a handheld games console.
- The advance of fibre technology already has the capacity to send 1,900 CDs per second into homes down a single strand of fibre.
Let’s consider a 10 year old child today: we have to ensure that what ever we are doing, it is to prepare him for a world which is yet to be made, where the jobs he may be doing may not yet exist and where he will be using technologies that haven’t yet been invented and where he will have to solve problems not yet imagined. This is the world that our present students will encounter when they are ready to enter their first job.
Successful schools will be places that are prepared to embrace change, prepared to be innovative and creative and prepared to take risks. As Charles Darwin said:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”.
- I want Herzlia to be such a school. I want Herzlia to be the school of choice for every teacher, student and parent because it is a place that embraces change and leads learning.
- I want Herzlia to lead the way in creating effective, stimulating and exciting learning that will in turn lead to our students making a massive contribution to society.
- I want you to want the same Herzlia for yourself. I want you to partner me in making Herzlia a place where we improve young people’s life chances. Let that be our legacy.
We are already in the process of making significant change. We have brought all our schools together to formulate a policy of one Herzlia. We are developing our technology as quickly as is reasonably possible. We have developed our own teachers union and tried hard in a financially difficult period to improve the lot of the teacher and we are trying to put into place new structures that will enable us to operate more efficiently.
We now have to look at how we are going to prepare our student body for the new world. In order to achieve this we have to have the will and the determination to work as a team.
We are all responsible for making this happen, each and every one of us sitting here today from the grade 12 teachers to the play school teachers to all the support staff. We have to find the energy and passion to ensure that Herzlia is not just a good school but indeed a great one.
In conclusion let me stress that above all else we have to ensure that whatever world awaits our students they must have learned how to be decent, caring and humane individuals.
The late Chaim Ginott, who was a principal and psychologist, included this comment told to him by a survivor of the Holocaust, on the last page of his book, Teacher and Child: "I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and buried by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education."
Ginott then added, "My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts should never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.
I ask you to join me in my attempt to make Herzlia a better place for all our learners.