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Senior Debate Final

Shannon Dent reports on the final round of the senior debate, which took place last week.

The idea of completely getting rid of religion over time seems like an impossible task with a lot of issues at hand. It is a very difficult motion to lean to one particular side. There are pros and cons to each, and listening to this debate was a very intriguing experience and well done to all of those to took part in it.

The debate was between our two finalists, Glen and Hollypark. Glen supported the motion while Hollypark debated against it. William Zitzmann was the very first speaker. He talked about the general issues that have been caused by religion. He didn’t just mention events of the past but also mentioned acts of violence because of religion today! He even played with the thought that Jesus was actually anti religion. William gave a introduction to what Glen believed the motion meant. Their main idea concentrated on how religion and faith are two very different things. The first speaker from Hollypark was next and that was Georgia Keegan Wignall. Georgia gave a very articulate speech about how religion was part of human rights, and how we should be able to decide to follow religion or not. She talked about how religion actually brings people together and helps people deal with the very scary concept of death. Georgia, just like William, gave us the main idea for Hollyparks argument.

Ji Woo Park was next as the second speaker for Glen. He gave eloquent and understandable argument that definitely drew everyone in. He further explained the main argument for Glen; religion and faith are two different things and he gave us some differences between the two. Ji Woo even quoted the Bible and showed us how there are many examples of immoral ideas, such as misogyny. He said that people can be faithful and not have to follow all the rules of religion. He also went on to talk about the vast differences of the world back then and the world now. The second speaker for Hollypark was Catherine Butt. She opened up her speech by asking the audience to imagine what life would be like without religion. She even acknowledged the problems religion has caused but how they didn’t necessarily have to be linked back to religion as these people are extremists. Another very valid point that Catherine brought us was the one of charities and how most of them have been built up by religion. She said “Religion teaches the art of giving and this is not just christianity”.

In Glen’s closing argument, given by Harry Oke, they wrapped up and reiterated some of Glen’s strongest points. He brought the debate back to him and showed us a personal view on it all. He talked about faith and religion once again and he even related back to Catherine’s point of charities and he said that charities would continue as they are built by faith, not just religion and the church. He finished off by saying “A person can be good without religion them to be”. Then Alexandra Murray Donaldson wrapped up by talking about how some people need religion to have a good life. It is comforting and a tradition. She also said that people cannot be restricted from religion, they should be able to follow religion if that’s what they want. She finished off by saying “Religion is part of a person’s family and soul. How would it even be possible to get rid of it”.

In conclusion, the debate was summarized by Mr. McCarthy, one of the judges. He announced the winners, Glen, and the best speaker, Ji Woo Park. He gave a bit of his opinion on the verdict as well as some comments to all the speakers. Thank you to our judges (Mr McCarthy, Ms Morley and Mr Brett), the audience members and to all of those who took part. Finally a big thank you to Ms Duggan for co-ordinating the debate throughout the year.

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Factfulness

This morning in Chapel the Sub-Warden talked about the idea of ‘Factfulness’ as promoted by the Hans Rosling. In this post are some links for pupils who are interested.

Rosling’s book Factfulness: ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think (co-authors Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund) is now in the College Library. An excellent resource too for Sixth Formers thinking about their Leaving Certificate English composition topics.

The Gapminder website is here, with lots of fact-based resources on the world today.

The Dollar Street project is here: you can see into the different lives and homes of people all over the world.

Below, Hans Rosling himself talks about a fact-based view of the world in “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen”.

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Parents’ Association News

Coffee Morning & Guest Speaker

A wonderful coffee morning was shared with around 60 parents in the Drawing Room in Whitehall on Friday morning. Thank you to our wonderful guest speaker, John Lonergan, who presented a thought provoking talk on “Parenting – The Challenges and the Rewards.” Having spent 24 years as the Governor of Mountjoy Prison, retiring in 2010, John has spoken for over 20 years on the topic of parenting, sharing his personal experiences as both a parent and grandparent.

John’s presentation on Friday was light-hearted with a simple matter-of-fact manner accompanied by charming anecdotes. As John rightfully pointed out, “there is no other task, that is as demanding, challenging, responsible, complicated and never-ending as, parenting.” There is no end to the list of skills and competencies that are expected of us.

John concluded that our primary goal as parents should be to guide and nurture our children to becoming mature, capable, independent, responsible and self-sufficient adults. Thank you John for emphasizing the importance of communication and consensus. For reminding us too of the joy of parenthood and for making us realise that parenting is often a two-way learning process.

Thank you parents for joining us and we hope to see you at the next PA event on the 15th Feb – see details below.

Recent Purchases by the Parents Association

In December the PA committee purchased five sofas and a television for the Common Room in Tibradden House. Once the television cabinet is completed, the TV will be installed. These will be welcome new additions for the comfort of the students in the House.

Next Get Together Event

To coincide with Mental Health week in the school the Parents’ Association is organising a walk for parents on 15th February at 9.00 am. This will last for about an hour and a half and we will be back at the school in time to have a coffee or tea before the Parent-Teacher meeting at 11.00am.

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School League Tables

The Warden has written an article on fee-paying schools for the Sunday Independent ‘School League Tables’ supplement. Here is what he wrote:

Parents love a school league table, particularly when it shows their child’s school in a good light. However, I am rather confused by the way the school league tables in Ireland are currently devised by a media eager to draw comparisons. Schools that send all their leavers to Irish universities get 100% (or even higher by an anomaly that I don’t understand), while schools such as ourselves, that think it is a good thing to encourage leavers to look around at universities in the UK, Europe and the USA, end up in 500th place, because, although every leaver goes on to third level education, only a third of them stay in Ireland, despite two thirds being from the island. Since when has having a narrow world view been a mark of excellence, particularly in a country with such a huge diaspora?

Last year here at St. Columba’s College we averaged 484 points per candidate at Leaving Cert, with a non-selective intake, a result that would probably put us at the top of the tree, or very close to it, if there were a league table based on these results. However, you may be surprised to know that I am delighted that there are no such tables here in Ireland. I have seen the disingenuousness and the shenanigans wrought by league tables in the UK. When a school’s reputation is based on its GCSE or A Level results, as is the case with the government league tables  over there, inevitably schools start to manipulate their exam entries accordingly. If an academically weaker child gets through their vigorous screening process, rather than deciding to do the best for that child, they create barriers for entry into the senior school, saying, for instance, that unless a pupil gets 8 A*’s or A’s at GCSE then he or she cannot continue in the school, or perhaps that unless the GCSE is an A* then the pupil may not continue with that subject to A Level. The child is only valued if he or she can contribute to the school’s awesome academic reputation. If not they are expendable. An exception might be made for a particularly good loose forward, of course, or a first violin.

There is much worse than this. Pupils going into their final year will be told to drop their weak subjects or advised that, if they refuse or ‘do not heed the school’s advice,’ they will be required to enter for the exams privately, so that the results will not appear in the official statistics of that school. It gets worse still. Some schools with international operations will enter their weak candidates through the international centre, thus ensuring that only those who are going to get the top grades are counted in the results that people see. I have even heard of a situation where a school created another school as a separate legal entity, so that weak candidates could be entered through that means, through a school that existed only on paper! It’s possibly not illegal but it is certainly immoral! My own belief is that once a child has entered a school, that school has the obligation to see that child through and do the best for them, regardless of their ability, rather than considering them surplus to requirements if they do not ‘add value.’

Maybe in Ireland some of these excesses would be avoided, since schools are by definition non-selective, but you can see where the introduction of Leaving Cert league tables could lead and I don’t think anyone here wants to run the risk of creating a league table monster such as exists in the UK. So up here on the hill we’ll just have to continue to grit our teeth each year when the current league table is published, until someone comes up with a moremeaningful way of judging schools in the overall context of the education they provide and the future opportunities they offer their alumni, both in Ireland and further afield.

Irish private schools are becoming an increasingly attractive option to many overseas parents, especially if they are looking for boarding. Being the only English speaking country in the EU after March 29thmay have benefits. Coming from the UK I am dismayed at the ever-increasing expense of a private education there and I cannot help feeling that the costs are out of control, as schools compete to build more and more state of the art facilities. Most private schools in the UK were founded to assist the sons (usually) of merchants or clergymen to get an education, but now that a full boarding education can cost £40,000 (45,000+ euros) a year, and even day fees are often upwards of £20,000, most hard-working professional parents can no longer afford to send their children privately, even if both are earning a decent salary.

Private education in Ireland is considerably less dear than it is in the UK and, while I do not deny that the cost is still a stretch, it is at least within range of more people. I therefore see private schools in Ireland as less exclusive and elitist than in the UK, especially since schools cannot screen pupils academically before offering places. We may be relatively expensive here at St. Columba’s, as journalists are often quick to point out, but we are still less than half the cost of the equivalent in the UK, while offering, I think, an equally good product.

Heads of private schools here may be reluctant to defend their schools because they have a perception that they are not popular in the public imagination.Indeed, when I moved here I was told to keep my head down and not court publicity, since ‘it is best to fly under the radar’. I don’t really subscribe to that approach because I believe very strongly in the service that we offer and which is offered by the excellent private sector as a whole. There will always be naysayers but there is certainly nothing to be ashamed of and plenty of which private schools can be very proud.

 

 

 

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Warden’s Thought on … Resilience

We use the word resilience a lot more now than we used, perhaps because we see less of it in young people. To put on my Latin teacher’s hat, the word comes from the verb resilio, which is a compound of salio, meaning ‘I jump.’ So resilience, literally, is the property of someone or something to jump or bounce back to its original state. You suffer a setback and you need to bounce back, you respond to failure by learning a lesson, in the hope that maybe you can avoid the failure the next time. It’s obvious really…and of course each time you bounce back and learn a lesson you are a little bit stronger for the experience.

To learn resilience in life you need to be allowed to fail, which is a problem for some educational policy makers who would rather ensure that no one fails, in case their self-esteem suffers and they are deflated. Hence those politically correct school sports days on which there are no winners and losers. I remember one year in the UK when the pass mark for a C at GCSE Maths was 15%. But if you are never allowed to fail, to come second, to fall over, to get a low mark, then you can never learn resilience. I don’t believe that young people nowadays are snowflakes, as some would have it, but I do believe that they are sometimes deprived of the chance of learning from failure and that is not their fault. If they have not learned to fail from an early age, then the first time it happens – as happen it must in the big world – their self-esteem takes a hammering and it can take a long time to pick up the pieces.

We learn resilience from a very young age. Toddlers fall over and get up again and it would be odd if parents refused to allow their children to walk just in case they fell over and got discouraged. Schools are no different and need to provide opportunities for failure rather than remove them. We get better at Maths by getting the question wrong and being told how to do it correctly. If we persevere we will get it right and then we can go on to the next question. If we are told that the wrong answer we have come up with is actually right, or close enough, then we don’t need to strive to be better. We need resilience in every single aspect of life: in our academic work, in our relationships, in our search for a job, in our sport, in learning an instrument, even in personal sadness and disappointment. Those last two are part of life, whether we like it or not, and we deal with those major setbacks much better if we have had experience of dealing with minor setbacks along the way.

Some schools have even put resilience lessons on the timetable, which sounds to me like a scandalous misuse of teaching time, as if resilience is an academic subject which can be learned outside of the rough and tumble of life and without anyone’s feelings being hurt. You cannot remove opportunities to fail from the everyday life of a school and then try and reintroduce them in theory in the classroom. Some children have to be in the first team and everyone should experience the frustration of being dropped…it feels like the end of the world, but actually it isn’t. Some children will get lower marks than others because that is what happens when pupils are gifted in different ways. Some can turn a cartwheel, others can run fast. Please don’t patronise children by removing their chance to fail or their chance to shine. In the grown up world you won’t get the first job for which you apply, you will get passed over for a promotion, you will make a poor decision in a relationship or at work, you will not be able to benchpress 100 kgs first time and you will at some point turn up to a function in totally the wrong outfit. You will be better for it and you will make sure you check the invitation better the next time.

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Junior Debating Final

Tadhg Rane O Cianain reports on last weekend’s Junior Debate final.

To be serious about climate change one needs to give up meat. This was the motion of the final of the Junior Debate this year, held in the BSR last Saturday night . On the proposing side, there was Calvin She, Form I, who started his team off with a good speech showing that his work was well researched, giving many statistics and facts. Next from the proposing Emma Hinde, Form III, delivered her speech with a nifty use of pie charts to back up her argument while also putting the opposition on the spot with a couple good point of orders. Form III pupil Caroline Hagar projected her speech across the hall with great ease and confidence giving many good examples backing the already well-delivered speech, she also contributed strong replies on a couple tricky queries from the audience. Last but not least Alex Hinde from Form II rounded up his teams work, which is a hard job, but Alex managed with ease much like his sister. On the opposing team, Donald Thompson, Form III, started his team off with many good points about eating habits affecting climate change and how we can help climate change by buying from local organic farmers instead of big companies. Ben Patterson then delivered his verdict giving good examples on the argument and altogether laying down a good case. Next Christopher Atkins, another Form I pupil, gave his speech with ease bringing many interesting points onto the floor having experience from previous debates. Finally, for the opposing team, Daniel Murray, also Form I, who throughout the debate had viciously questioned the opposition backing them into a corner where they struggled to answer, attacked and dismantled the opposition’s argument with ease and with a great choice of words. In the end the proposing team reigned victorious through confident well delivered speaking and great choice of evidence. The best speaker was awarded to both Daniel Murray and Caroline Hagar, who both performed amazingly. All in all it was a great intense debate with a great topic and I am counting down the days until the next one.

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Art, Craft & Photography Prizes 2019

The Art Department has issued the themes for this year’s Art Craft & Photography Prizes, for both Junior and Senior pupils. The themes for this year’s prizes are JOURNEY and IDENTITY and a wide range of styles and techniques are welcome. This year’s competition will be judged by artist and Old Columban Conrad Frankel who will also speak on the night of the prize giving. One of his paintings is shown above.

Click here for full details of the brief, with useful tips for entrants.

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