“Well, from my understanding, it’s a pretty neat school where you get to meet interesting people from around the world while learning to take on your own responsibilities in an environment that fosters freedom, independence, and responsibility.”
This may not have been exactly what my dad said to me the first time I was exposed to UWC, but it was fairly similar. He told me of an entirely unique school that valued commonly overlooked ideals, which largely contributed to the whole of the students’ education, rather than solely their academic ambition. A UWC, according to the official website aims to create “Agents of Change” through the parallel education on a personal level that ultimately does not aim to create the super-student, but instead the super-individual. “Man,” I thought, “This sounds like the perfect place for me.”
The first few weeks of the first term exemplified this mentality. People applied from around the world with common goals and values in line with that of the UWC. Everyone signed the community agreement before meeting anyone else and assumed that the UWC would hold true to its equivalent agreement with the student. In those first two or three weeks all the first years, nervous, confused, and excited as they were, demonstrated what any and every UWC should. The students were outgoing, respectful, aware of their actions, and generally looked for provocative discussion with others. I experienced this myself, and became enthused that my hopes and expectations had been fulfilled.
One night, while sitting in a courtyard in Wada 3, I stumbled upon an unfamiliar 2nd year who was worked up about the changes they had seen in the school between last year and this year. The topic was mostly about smoking, Sheesha and punishment in general. I politely listened, as I was still culture shocked and adjusting to being in a completely new environment, and then thought about what they had said. It seemed to me that everything Dr. Long was doing was great. He was trying to withhold the ideals established by Kurt Hahn that emphasized personal health through moderation and respect for those around you as well as yourself. “What’s the issue here,” I thought to myself, “it seems to me that there’s a bunch of smokers that simply want to promote their addiction rather than thinkers trying to better the school.”
A couple weeks later when I went to my first night in Paud, I saw more of what the school was really like; at least as Dionysus promotes it. People ‘unwound’ and demonstrated typical teenage behavior after the release of the often-tight grasp of their parents. We tend to think, “I’m a half a world away… no one can touch me… I must be invincible!”
There is an important distinction, though incredibly subtle, that I think both students and faculty miss in this ongoing disagreement. Students come from a place of pseudo-invincibility and want to promote complete freedom one finds after university while living on their own. Faculty come from a place of caring for the students and wanting to maintain a balance of freedom and structure to both protect and educate the students in areas of their life outside academia. The trouble is, firstly, that the balance is incredibly hard to achieve. How can we give different people the perfect dose of freedom? The second trouble is that the students and faculty think they’re talking about the same thing. While students advocate complete freedom with responsibility, they fail to see that they cannot alone regulate themselves in a healthy way.
Rules offer us a medium of governing our actions. To try to achieve a balance of freedom, the faculty must be responsible for setting these boundaries. However, I do not believe that this campus is a place of dictators and tyrants; it is rather a place of semi-democratic moderators. If you were troubled with the problem of setting laws for a community of people, what would determine the necessity of a law? If someone does something harmful to themself or the community, then a law would need to be established for the protection of both the individual and the community. If the act committed by that individual were never committed, or was done so in a non-harmful way; however, the law would have no place in that society. In this sense I find that parallel to the wise cliché, “With freedom comes responsibility,” we find that with responsibility comes freedom. If we as a student body choose to demonstrate more responsibility and respect, the rules being made without our consult would not be in place or need to be decided for us in that sense.
What I just said, however, is very ambiguous and I feel deserves some clarification. How are we as individuals supposed to demonstrate more responsibility and respect? I think that the answer lies in our understanding of the two words and their connection to our actions. When I hear “respect”, I think of the ideal person doing good to others. When I hear “responsibility”, I think of the ideal person living in moderation and consciousness of the relationship between their actions and the effect they have on the community they live in. These definitions are true in a general sense; however, what I should be also be hearing is not solely that of an idealistic and general implementation, but that of a simple and achievable act. Rather than the ideal respectful person I think of doing general good deeds, I should think of keeping a cleaner courtyard and saying “Namaste” to the RKHS workers and gardeners as I pass by. Rather than the ideal responsible person I think of being self-aware, I should think of keeping my voice down at night for my neighboring room and waking up my sleepy roommates up in the morning so they don’t miss their first blocks. When a student passed the workers on the basketball court and noticed they lacked proper shelter and basic things like blankets to keep warm at night, he didn’t just keep walking. He decided to put together donation boxes and act on the basis of a need within our community to do something, which I see as exemplary to the UWC’s model of an “agent of change.” It is often these small things in life that matter more than the large ones.
This is actually quite a big issue I see in our community. I heard a story from a friend about the time he noticed the “smallness” of the cooks in the kitchen on Diwali. He noticed the people around him that were doing so much for him that are overlooked everyday. In the heat of celebration he decided, though some may have discouraged it, that they should take a break and celebrate with the rest of the community. He led the cooks out of the kitchen and started wildly dancing and laughing. Some of the cooks even had tears in their eyes as they reached into the air with liberating joy. It was a moment, he said, that made UWC make sense.
It is moments like these, on the very basic and fundamental level that need to be had first, in my opinion, before we go gallivanting about raising money for a cause that is noble, yet completely disconnected from our community. There are countless chances, which we all have to learn and benefit as UWC students on campus every day. Instead of being nerds by day and philanthropists by college meetings, we should instead strive to live one and the same all of the time. We must keep in mind that a UWC is a school, which aims to foster the education and formation of self-aware students and ultimately create “agents of change”. If we cannot live our lives at MUWCI in this fashion, then there is no conceivable manner in which we are going to live our lives after MUWCI like this.
Regardless of whether we as individuals have been meeting this ideal or not, we are still all young and ambitious seeds of change. The chances to nurture ourselves are all around us and moreover incredibly supported by our teachers and peers. It is a once in a lifetime chance to become the person UWC claims to create. What I see right now, due to the nature of the school and the reality of student life, is the self-perpetuation for an environment ideal for the incubation of Agents of Conformity. We (students) are butting heads with the faculty because we think we know what’s best for us. I refute that proposal on the basis that we are not ready for or aware of what’s best for us. We also continually demonstrate our lack of respect and responsibility both individually and for the rest of the community. The purpose of this essay is not to change the school in a general and ideal way. The purpose, and reality as I foresee it, is to dig up everyone’s seed of change and replant it with a new vision in mind. I’m not looking to change the hearts and minds of everyone, simply to give everyone something to consider in the argument. As most of us already realize, we are in an immense position of control in a community like this. The key, I believe, to being ready to start to utilize this control is to recognize where we as a student body are at, and then to decide whether we want to be silent students in an IB school which has strict rules that are forced upon us or whether we want to be agents of change in a UWC where rules are agreed on by the community and respected rather than feared. The choice does not belong to the community, rather the individual. So if we really want to perpetuate the UWC ideals we so often long for, we should first look to ourselves.
Max
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