Special Session 1: Keeping Tradition While App...
Lecture 1 - Keeping Tradition While Approaching to Modern Education
[Moderator] Mi-seok JIN, Senior Research Fellow, KRIVET
[Presenter] Tony Little, Headmaster, Eton College
[ Description ]
Eton College is a school rich in tradition. In the modern age there are those people, certainly in the UK, who decry tradition and claim that being connected to history means being shackled to the past. There is danger for any society or community in paying too great a reverence to the way things were in the past at the expense of valuing the present and preparing for the future, but it is my belief that a community such as a school can take great strength from its ethos and educational philosophy refined over many years and, at the same time, be dynamic and active in facing the future. This is our aim at Eton. In this session I hope to explain something about the Eton mentality which has lead to the development of a successful system of education, but I would like to stress that there is no one solution, no single approach to education that will work for all young people around the world. At Eton we always seek to learn from the achievements of others. What follows is an analysis of a philosophy of education that has grown and thrived for 570 years and which has flourished because it has stayed faithful to core principles while changing with the times.
