It may not have been the grand finals of a national debating competition where those schools considered to be the best in the land usually pit wits and strategies against each other to determine the country’s debating ‘top guns; and yet, for all that, the recent report in the media that St. George’s High School had reached the regional finals of the JOF Haynes Debating Competition was as decidedly uplifting as it was, perhaps, surprising.
St. George’s High, after all, if we were to use what can sometimes be the altogether misleading official ‘ranking’ of Secondary Schools as a gauge, would not be expected to find itself in the ‘big league’ as far as inter-school debating is concerned. Indeed, even if account is taken of the seeding of the schools in order to seek, in the earlier rounds of the tournament, to level the playing field somewhat, the likes of St. George’s High would probably still not be expected to shine, weighed down as the school is by prejudices that clinically dismiss its likes as no more than ‘extras,’ contrived to cater for the intellectual underachievers. Indeed, if one were to hazard a guess as to where St. George’s sits in the official pecking order of High Schools in the city, much of the betting would probably be on the school being perched on one of the lower rungs of the ladder, altogether indifferent to its circumstance, anyway.
So that in a sense, what St. George’s has done in reaching the regional finals of the JOF Haynes Debating Competition is to openly challenge the prejudices which, all too frequently, are applied with a reckless arbitrariness, that is, to say the least, disturbing. Who knows, the School’s debating team may have done more than that.
From what we are led to understand, St. George’s High is not particularly populated with students possessed of lofty intellectual ambitions. You might think, therefore, that the school itself is not possessed of an ethos that one associates with what can be the demanding task of preparing school teams for debating competitions. Indeed, the conventional wisdom that obtains is that schools like St. George’s High serve no greater purpose than that of a kind of revolving door for low-achievers who show up for school because they are sent and who suffer the misfortune of being ignored by teachers so that they ‘miss out’ on whatever little learning might otherwise be available to them. They come from nowhere and go nowhere, at least so the conventional wisdom goes.
We know now that in the instance of St. George’s, the truth is rather different……….not just for itself but perhaps for other schools across the country that have been similarly written off as intellectual graveyards for underachievers. It is a flaw in our education system which what St. George’s High has done compels us to ponder.
The school has now done its own significant part to overturn the myth of what many believe is an altogether contrived pecking order that is deficient in its understanding of the logic of learning. It has sent a boisterous and hugely uplifting signal that students possessed of the appropriate mindset can and do break chains that arbitrarily imprison them in spaces that they may well not belong, demolishing the barriers that restrain, paying greater regard to the fact that accomplishment is, all too often, an issue of mind over matter.
In a very real sense St. George’s High has put down an eye-catching marker.
