When we make our exits in the march of time, we need to give meaningful gifts to those travellers who march on. These gifts for the future should be something that can be stewarded, used and adapted over time by multiple generations. Noah’s Ark carried the seeds of life and all things precious for the future through the deluge that destroyed everything. Education is an abode to carry on the seeds of knowledge and culture that will drive humanity forward.

We are now living in the critical golden hour for humanity when intervention stands the best chance of preventing doom. The planet is a common home which humanity as a whole uses as a single family. We need to go beyond nationalism and fanaticism, and strive for diversity and pluralism that preserve dialects, cultures and belief systems.

The swimming pool from Ibsen’s play, Enemy of the People is contaminated, due to the machinations of vested interests. It is symbolic of modern day common areas and public institutions running the risk of being tinged with slow poison of corruption, corporates and favoritism. Public spaces like parks and gardens, institutions like the judiciary, universities and medical colleges and public sector undertakings like roads and communications should be kept accessible to all and serving all. They are not to be tainted with the veneer of consumerism or the sheen of banal urbanity. Rightful services now tend to be reduced to commodities in the era of post truth. This is especially true today when personality cults are making a comeback, as Frank Dikotter rightly points out in his book, How to Be a Dictator. He warns of leader- dictators projecting themselves as saviours and liberators, mocking the very tenets of the democracy that fostered them.

Humankind, interestingly, is not that easily misled or misled. Human thinking evolves from the gross to the subtle, from the crude to the refined. It is said that all generation stands on the shoulder of preceding one, that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But the fact is that children who stand on the shoulders are no lesser giants. 16-year old Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg says, “We should wake up, and we should also try to wake the adults up, because they are the ones mostly responsible for the ecological crisis, we find ourselves in .”These young people are like characters in search of the author in Luigi Pirandello’s book. They are searching for adults who can guide them in setting right the skewed balance of an endangered planet.

The world today is ensnared in an ecological crisis at the root of which is ethical, cultural and spiritual crises. While advances in technology can lead to multi-pronged progress in all walks of life, there also lies the danger of creating social hermits amongst us. These are people who feel more at home in cyberspace than in a physical community. They prefer virtuality to reality and cannot accommodate changes at a relational level. It is rightly said that we need to mould our children to join Team Human rather than Team Digital.

Education should not be just for competence and career only. It should be aimed at developing character and compassion as well. It is time not just to celebrate our legacies but to create designs or a blueprint for our future. We cannot deny the divine design that governs this universe. In order to survive we need to align the human design with it. Every day the school bell rings to usher in the architects of this human design. Wishing everyone a wonderful educational experience atop the Silver Hills. Please feel free to call on me to share constructive suggestions and matters of individual concern if any.

With warm regards,

Fr Binoy K Francis CMI, Principal

Email: principalshps@gmail.com