The world is full of words. Words used to create and to challenge, to inspire and to motivate. Words are particularly used in academia to articulate problems, create meaning or to refine ideas. They are nuanced and powerful and help us to understand where a child is, in terms of their learning. Words show us what young people are thinking, what learning is taking place and where we should next invest. And words, apart from being used to learn, teach us of wisdom and what it means to be fully alive.

With the increased volume and density of words, with the uncensored flow of opinions over expertise, and the weighting that is given to voices online, words that used to mean something are being diluted by overuse. They are thrown around like confetti by those who sit on the sidelines of education, critiquing the role of those “in the arena”. Labels such as “21st-century skills”, “standardised testing”, “reforms”, “teaching and learning”. They all roll off the tongue, bounce off the walls of cyberspace, and add more noise and clutter to an already deafening universe.

In contrast, the original academia began in an olive grove outside Athens, where Plato taught his students about life and about wisdom and about how to think. Not what to think - how to think. It was a small independent learning community, a space that fostered reflective thought. It was a sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena.

It became known as akademeia, and it was a place to educate, or to “draw out”. Plato spent hours challenging and encouraging others to think through the implications of their words, to dwell on humanity, and to come to their own conclusions about what it means to live a good life.

Today, one of our major academic challenges is to reclaim the spirit of that independent, sacred space. In the face of relentless pressure to the contrary, it is a challenge to stop, pause and reflect. To think for ourselves. There is enormous pressure to wade through the flood of opinions, to take mandates and directives without question, to speed up and make rapid changes lest we be perceived as old-fashioned or out of date. It is only human nature to want to be seen as cutting edge and to not be left behind, and we are all falling victim to the urge.

The volume of this noise tends to drown out anything other than binary and dogmatic persuasion. You are with it or you are not, you are in or you are out, you understand it or you don’t, you go to a “good” school or a “bad” one, you’re outdated or you’re contemporary.

But not all change is progress. There is great value in challenging this thinking. There is great wisdom in not following the crowd - in determining, in your own context, what matters and what is important to pass on to the next generation.

The ability to be a part of society but to remain independent of group norms and groupthink is essential for a true education to take place. When you have “para-educators” sitting on the sidelines, dictating the pace and the terms of educational change, and then demanding what should be taught and what should not - at the expense of wisdom and relationships and conversations - then we run the very real risk of focusing on elements that create noise but don’t necessarily educate.

In the immortal words of Mark Twain: “Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.” Times are a-changing, of this there is no doubt. We do not want our young people missing out on what they need to live fulfilling, healthy and happy lives, in which they can contribute as a thriving adult to the society in which they live.

The pursuit of wisdom

But life is rarely binary, and young humans rarely flourish in prescriptive environments where one person or group of people, believing they know best, dictates the agenda. The role of independent education, in fostering an appreciation of the complex, of the nuanced and of “first-principle” thinking, is key to developing equally independent and thoughtful young adults.

In some ways, such a position is deliberately anti-minimalist. We must be careful not to focus on skills at the expense of school communities, with all the relational opportunities we have to truly educate young people in the spirit of the original olive grove. And while school communities are a fundamental building block to these relationships, they must not be at the expense of education. Education is so much more than the school community in which a child is raised. And while education is more nuanced and enriching than skills, and moves well beyond any one school environment, it cannot be at the expense of knowledge.

Education takes place in one context, but knowledge is about life. And even knowledge must bow to wisdom. Wisdom, an old-fashioned word in so many contexts, is what allows our young people to make good decisions and to thrive in life. You can have all the skills, belong to a great school, be well-educated and even have enormous knowledge - but, in the true spirit of academia, it is wisdom we seek to be truly fulfilled, to make good decisions, for the benefit of others.

Independent education allows the development of a culture that seeks to bring out the best in young men and women, that can purposefully foster independent thought, looking beyond the status quo to develop wisdom, and to challenge our predisposition towards “groupthink”.

Thus, one of our greatest academic challenges is to ensure that, in our desire to equip our young people for a rapidly changing, technologically driven world, we take time in the olive groves of academia to use our words carefully and thoughtfully, to foster independent thought, and to never lose sight of the importance of wisdom.

This essay can be found in The State of Independence: key challenges facing srivate Schools today, edited by Jane Lunnon and David James and published by Routledge (bit.ly/LunnonJamesBook)

Briony Scott is principal of Wenona, an independent girls’ school in Sydney, and a director of the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia

This article originally appeared in the 19 April 2019 issue under the headline “In search of Plato’s sacred olive grove”