Every school and university is someone’s alma mater and alumni networks are more or less well managed, ranging from highly curated and tentacular Ivy League-styled operations run by a development army with polished and frequent communications, to semi-formal and ad-hoc arrangements by individuals organising parties and get togethers.
Educational institutions tends to view alumni as symbols of the institutions’ achievements and as potential fundraisers for the building of the institution’s posterity and legacy. Indeed, alumni contribute in major and concrete ways to schools and universities, allowing projects to thrive, programmes to survive and the infrastructure to be sustained.
Recently we hosted1500 Ecolint alumni from across the world. They gathered in our Greek theatre to hear the brilliant oratory of Canadian ambassador Bob Rae, LGBTQI ally Pritha Rami and Cambridge Zero’s Beth Simpson as well as the music of the award-winning singer and songwriter Lori Lieberman, who performed with our students and staff.
It was a wonderful, emotional, privileged moment to exchange with great minds and souls. What struck me was not only the passion that our alumni have for this remarkable institution, the world’s first international school, the veneration and ongoing respect they have for their teachers living and passed, but the widespread intellectual and moral engagement they have with world issues, the commitment they have in their lives to making the world a better place.
Through some rigorous exchanges, collective reflections and discussions, the reunion felt very pedagogical: we were learning from each other just as students would do in a well-run classroom. And this is where it struck me that the real power of alumni is that they are a living extension of the educational process; they are lifelong learners who are practising the values of what they learned out in the real world. In fact, alumni are not only ambassadors of the school, they are a continuation of the educational process through the example they set, the way they live their lives, the education they give to their own children.
I could feel in the words and actions of more than one the influence of their teachers, it was almost as if this was the great project that teachers would have been so proud of, only the project was no longer in the classroom, no longer hemmed in by assessment protocols, this was the school of life, the greatest lesson of all, the whole purpose of an education!
The power of alumni (from the Latin “to nourish”) is that they are the heartbeat of the school outside the classroom. The echoing of the heartbeat resonates with what happens in the school, and the life of the school drives the rhythm of the heartbeat outside.
For alumni are not only students but also custodians: when they return to school they hope to see the values that were there when they graduated; to make sure that the leadership is honouring the ethos of the institution, whcih is a good thing. Alumni help keep the moral purpose of the school in tact.
To all my fellow educators and leaders: reach out to your alumni, engage with them, learn from them, let’s federate with all those who have been in our institutions to rally around the values of peace, inclusion and sustainability that characterise not only international education but UNESCO and the UN’s vision for the future and the clarion call of all humanist institutions.
When we start to think of the mission of our school beyond its walls into the whole community, those within the institution and those who continue its work outside: retired staff, alumni, ex-parents, it creates a tremendous effect of strength and unity; a beautiful song of life that folds everything into its melody.