> SPEECH BY KEVIN STANNARD

Qualifications may be likened to valves that connect the past to the future: in this case connecting the recent educational experience of these exceptional students with futures bright with possibilities in the wider world.

We mustn’t under-estimate the complexity of that world, and to make the point I want to take you back, just for a moment, to a much simpler world, 200 years ago – the early nineteenth century – and to two remarkable but little-remembered people in particular.

First, someone who is almost unknown in the English-speaking world today, and yet who, around 1815 was one of the most famous people in the world: Alexander von Humboldt. He has been described as the last universal scholar, a true renaissance man, scientist, explorer, man of letters. People like him believed that to every question there is an unambiguous answer, one that may be found and catalogued in a single body of knowledge, and capable of being comprehended by every educated individual.

And so, on his expeditions to Europe and the Americas, he studied meteorology, biogeography, vulcanicity, economics, sociology and politics. He sought to encapsulate the sum of all knowledge about the world in a single work: Kosmos, subtitled a ‘Physical description of the universe’.

Tragically, perhaps predictably and certainly ironically, he died before he could finish it. Since then, no single person has had the audacity to attempt anything like it.

And then there was Andrew Jackson, who in 1815 was a general in the American Army and destined to become President of the United States. He had just defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans. It was a famous victory, but perhaps one of the most pointless battles in human history, because the war had in fact ended the year before. It took three months for the news of the peace treaty to get through to the belligerents.

The point is that these two men stood at the very threshold of a revolution in both knowledge and communication. These were among the last generation of people for whom knowledge was straightforward, a finite collection of manageable facts, and for whom information travelled only as fast as the people carrying it.

Since then that world – sedate, stable, slow-moving, has disappeared. To be sure, there were still vestiges of it even when people like me were at school, being taught that the stock of facts mastery of which would qualify us mysteriously for the adult world.

Young people now face a completely different world, one in constant flux, characterised by unprecedented uncertainty and change. ‘Facts’ are slippery, open to interpretation, and are quickly superseded as new knowledge accumulates and old concepts get discarded.

Information, ideas and attitudes circle the world as fast as thought itself, without regard to any friction imposed by distance. Think only about the difference between the old-fashioned encyclopaedia (a fixed stock of knowledge, with new editions appearing only every few years) and wikipedia – multi-authored, contentious and subject to prank entries.

What sort of education is relevant to young people in this wiki world? Certainly not one based on the accumulation of facts with built-in obsolescence, and not one based on the passive handing down of received wisdom.

It needs to be one that gives students a means of getting a handle on this world of change and uncertainty – described by some sociologists as a state of ‘hypermobility’.

Education today, as you know as well as anyone because you attend schools that practise it, is about fostering flexibility of mind, independence of thought, a critical, enquiring spirit, a refusal to take things for granted, a capacity for self-organisation and an autonomous work ethic.

Good education is all about providing the resources to enable young people to make sense of and operate successfully in a world of change, where jobs don’t last forever and skills need to be relearned as you go.

And what’s the function of exams in such a world? Exam success is the outward and visible sign that a student is equipped, not just to survive, but to succeed and to thrive in a world of choice, challenge and opportunity.

What we have in front of us tonight is a group of students of whom any family, any school and any community would be rightly proud. For you have grasped the opportunities provided by your schools, and by your families, and shown outstanding abilities in your chosen spheres.

Looking at the young people whose success we are celebrating this evening, it is clear that you are ready to take on the challenges, and grasp the opportunities that lie ahead. It is clear that you can take your places among the very-best equipped in the world.

And so it gives me great pleasure to award prizes to those whose achievements have indeed put them ‘at the top of the world’.

Kevin Stannard
Director, International Curriculum Development
University of Cambridge International Examinations