Since we started school six weeks ago we have been faced with natural and political disasters in over a dozen countries as well as major wars in the Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and now in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Trying to understand the causes and solutions to such suffering is a life’s work. Yet, being ‘international’ means that we try to enlarge our understanding and, perhaps even more importantly, our circle of compassion and care. Students and adults alike can feel numb and helpless when faced with such tragedy, but an international person knows that to deny or diminish someone else’s suffering is to dehumanise them, and to dehumanise a people, whether Russian or Ukrainian, Palestinian or Israeli, is to call into question our common humanity. We must not fall into this trap.
So, while we may not have perfect understanding and we certainly don’t have solutions to offer our students, I know we are united in standing with the many innocent people around the world who are in pain because of the bigotry, prejudice, and violence.
We must be clear with our students that acknowledging the suffering caused is often a better place to begin understanding than to have a debate around who is to ‘blame’ for different conflicts. It is ‘better’ because I think it will unite us in support of those who need help the most and because it encourages us to ask more human types of questions.
This is our goal – that the discussions which go on in classrooms, during learner initiated action projects, over lunch and during assemblies lead to greater compassion and better questions on the part of our students. Thank you for discussing the news with your children and for listening to their questions.
For those of you who would like to do something more and are interested in some pragmatic guidelines on resisting apathy and supporting action, please refer to the guidelines provided by the IB.
Our approach to language learning is closely connected to international mindedness. Please keep reading to understand our approach to helping students achieve language learning success.