Love Learning: why we are here at school

Our vision at NBCS is Love Learning. I have said often enough, and only somewhat facetiously, that our vision is two words so that I can remember it. What I mean is this. Our vision needs to be clear enough and memorable enough for all of us to remember it and carry it around, for all of us to know why we are here at school. It also helps us to define our purpose and our product. What do schools produce? It’s an interesting question, given that one way of answering the question is to say, students. But we know that students are people, and their lives are bigger than just school. We know that their development and growth as people is shaped by their families and by their school, as well as by their wider community.

My argument is that our main product at NBCS is learning. And yes, learning takes on many forms, has many guises and happens in a variety of contexts, including within and beyond the classroom, at school and at home, on stage or on the oval, in relationships and interactions.

This then raises the question: what is learning? To which our answer is that learning is the ability to make sense of the unknown, which we do by connecting it to the known. As we grow our body of knowledge, it becomes easier and easier to build schemas or models of understanding with which to make sense of the world and of the new things we come across. And we remember that there are different types of knowledge: declarative knowledge—knowing things, facts, information; procedural knowledge—knowing how to do things, build things, make things, ride a bike, use a lathe, write an essay; and experiential knowledge, which couples the above two forms through our own experiences.

Which is a long way of saying that the main thing we want for our students is to be learners, to love learning, because learning is our main product. There are, of course, lots of by-products. Some of the great by-products from school are wellbeing, Christian understanding, friendships, experiences, opportunities, and yes, even results. But the primary prism by which we view school, and its purpose, is learning. If we get the product right, then we get the happy benefit of having lots of good by-products. But if we focus too heavily on the by-products, we then run the risk of missing the main game, learning, as well as diminishing the very by-products that we were elevating.

When our students leave NBCS, we want them to leave with six things – Values, Effort, Learning, Character, Relationships and Opportunities (VELCRO). We want all of these things for them, and between home and school, they can have these things and carry them into the future. But our first focus, as a school, is learning, in much the same way that I suspect that the first focus of home is character, but both home and school want all of these things for our students. As we all do our bit, students included, they can have the product and its by-products.

Tim Watson
Principal