Education Stalwarts 2021|Dr. Peter McLaughlin CEO of CHIREC International School |Education Influencer
Dr. Peter McLaughlin CEO of CHIREC International School, one of the top Education Influencer is with EducationToday sharing his experience.
Coming from a humble background and being raised in an environment of religious discrimination, it is education that has transformed my life and helped me beat the odds. My mother dropped out of school at fourteen to work, and my father at sixteen, but they were both well-read, and our modest homes were always filled with books and the Google of its day- a wonderful set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that as a boy I sat in front of like it was an altar of the intellect and scoured the volumes for knowledge. My father read, thought, and fought his way to become the managing director of a large international engineering company. Both my parents and their generation inculcated in mine, the utmost respect for education, teachers and elders, books, duty and sacrifice. The first in the history of my family ever to go to university, I went all the way to a PhD, university lecturing, research, and post-doctoral fellowship at the London School of Economics, and publications. We did not believe in half-measures.
I was lucky to be educated at excellent state schools. Extrapolating from my own good fortune, the great tragedy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been the almost universal failure of state education systems that have deprived untold millions of children of their right to free education of the highest quality. The private sector, often unsupported and even vilified by governments, has had to fill the vacuum for too many children globally, and also for the poor. One of my formative early memories is of seeing underprivileged African children lining up patiently for hours in the sun outside the public library just to get a hot seat to read books – as one departed, another rushed eagerly in to take the vacated place. That moving image of hunger and hunger for learning has stayed with me for over fifty years and has made me intolerant of those who are privileged and yet waste their opportunities to learn.
For various reasons, most of my career has been in private schools. When I started teaching in the UK, I was dismayed by the low expectations teachers had of their students; if a child was deemed ‘not very good’ at something, they were left to languish. This ‘conspiracy of low expectations’ has blighted a generation, and I love India for its strong culture of educational aspiration.
In my teaching and leadership roles, I have always believed that the fruits of genius are available to us all; it is just that geniuses have a flying start and the rest of us have to make a much bigger effort to get there. Consequently, I reject the exclusionary messages of ‘topper’ culture, not for its aspiration, which is honourable, but for the corollary that academic attainment is all about talent and for skewing children’s minds by dividing the world into ‘toppers’ and ‘losers’ – so why try? Academic excellence emerges from curiosity, perseverance, focus, discipline, a willingness to take risks and a mind that is open to possibility, none of which habits of mind is dependent on IQ or ‘talent’. The biggest hurdle I have faced in my the course of my journey is getting teachers not to address and value only their ‘best’ pupils, but to see the potential that lies in every child in front of them in the classroom. Embedding a culture of effort and getting teachers and students to take that seriously is a big task in an increasingly ‘winner takes all’ socio-economic environment that rewards too often those whose principal ability is knowing how to game the system. It takes six to seven years to change an organizational culture in a thoroughgoing way, but I have always been in a hurry. A child is only five years old once, ten years old once, and so on; we cannot ask children and their parents to wait n number of years for us to transform our teaching and learning cultures.
The core belief that has never left me is that education is the most powerful way to change the lives of individuals, as it did for me, and whole societies. It is far too important a matter to be left to those without a powerful sense of mission and vocation.I am therefore very driven and have found a home in the private education world in which I have more freedom to deliver what children need to flourish and succeed. However, I shall die with the regret that I did not go into politics to achieve my goals, not just for a limited number of children, but for all children.
I have won awards in my time but stopped accepting them well over a decade ago. I believe the greatest reward in education is to see children who have struggled for whatever reason to learn something or anything, but triumphing over the odds, and to see the look on their faces when they surprise themselves with their achievements.
In my career spanning four decades across the globe, I have worked with many teachers, middle and senior managers with a sense of vocation and mission who were pillars of support for my own vision, mission and philosophy when I was in the classroom and later at various desks heading institutions in the UK, Africa, the Middle East and India. My wife, Elizabeth, is also a professional educator and a stalwart support to me in this all-consuming vocation.
To the upcoming generation in education, I say: Along with healthcare, education is the noblest of professions; if you want to make big money, do something else; if you want rewards beyond measure and to shape the future of many individuals and your society, work with the young. The ‘customer’ in education is not a single consumer of your work, but three-fold: the child who must draw on the education you give them for the rest of their days; the parent who pays through taxes and/or fees and is filled with hope; and the third is your society and economy.
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