22 September 2017

I would like to begin this afternoon with a quick story about the impact of education.

Many years ago, a graduate class at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the United States were given an assignment. They were told to go to the slums of Baltimore, find 200 boys aged between 12 and 16, and investigate their background and environment. The class were then asked to predict the possible life outcomes of these boys. After conducting the research, and consulting with social statistics, the class concluded that 90% of the boys would spend some time in jail.

Twenty-five years later, another group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins were given the job of testing the prediction. While some had died, and some had moved away, the second graduate class were able to make contact with 180 out of the original 200 young men.

How accurate do you think that original prediction might have been? Any guesses?

They found that only four of the group had ever been sent to jail. Just 2%. 

When pressed, most of the men, who had lived in a place where 90% of them were expected to go to jail, admitted to researchers that: ‘There was a teacher…’

The researchers found that 75% of the men who had participated in the study identified the same teacher who had had a profound impact on their lives. Understandably, when the researchers tracked down the teacher, they had a few questions for her. They wanted to know the reason for these men to remember her after all those years. She replied that she didn’t know, but on thinking about it, she said that she ‘loved those boys as if they were her own children’.

Now I won’t guarantee that your careers will have such a profound impact on the communities you will serve, but I can promise you that for the young minds you will help educate, you will inspire them in ways neither you, nor they can possibly fathom.

The American historian, Henry Brooks Adams, summed up this idea succinctly: ‘Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.’

It is my great honour to welcome you to our Catholic education community. You are joining a system of schools that has operated across this country since colonial times, long before the establishment of the government school system. By your choice to become teachers and to choose to work in a Catholic school, you have all joined a family, and a faith tradition that is over two thousand years old.

In the Catholic education tradition we believe in the inner beauty, dignity and value of each individual who comes into our care. You are entrusted by parents and families with not just the care, but the intellectual, social and emotional development of their most precious asset – their children.

As journalist Bob Talbert once wrote, ‘teaching kids to count is fine – but teaching them what counts is best’.

Parents repeatedly tell us that they value an education that considers the needs and potential of their child as a whole person, which extends beyond their academic results. They chose a Catholic education because they want an education for their children that will also shape them spiritually, physically, creatively and emotionally.

Trust me – schools and education have been a constant in my professional working career. Many years ago, before many, if not all of you, were born, I was a teacher. Like you, I played that vital role in shaping the values and understandings of how people should engage for the common good.

That led to my second career – as a Member of Parliament – where I had a role in shaping the way our society and its people interact through the laws made by the Parliament, which help direct behaviour and have consequences if members of our society do not conform. In that world, I had the privilege to serve as the Parliamentary Secretary of Education, having a guiding hand in Victoria’s three schooling systems, and delivering world-class standards that many still try to replicate around Australia.

My third career is the one I have in Catholic education, now as its Executive Director, not only across the Archdiocese of Melbourne, but also for the state of Victoria.

But it’s not just a lifetime of service to education that helps me understand the great value an education can bring to people’s lives – I am a living example of it. As a young man growing up in Commission Housing in Broadmeadows, I understood that a good education was the only ticket out of poverty. I would not be standing here before you today without the guidance of those teachers, nuns and brothers who taught me all those years ago.

I urge you to use your God-given gifts as teachers to help shape the young minds entrusted to your care. As the Irish poet William Yeats put it, education is not ‘the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire’. Light those fires.

As a final thought from me, I want to remind you that change is both a constant and a given in education. It will be a feature of your entire professional life, and I urge you to embrace it.

While our goal in Catholic schools is the continued focus on enabling every young person to be a successful, engaged and purposeful learner, the manner and method of achieving this has evolved through the contribution of thousands of teachers who have gone before you. We look forward to the contribution you will make in the years to come.

Finally, for World Teachers’ Day we put together some advice from some of the students in our schools to help our teachers better understand their role. I have no doubt it will be very helpful for you all.