Welcome Back! The Scottish Enlightenment and our Core Values

Dear SSIS Faculty –

I assume that most of you are at home this evening, some exhausted and others wide awake and trying to fall sleep as you each recover from jetlag. The final days of summer break are over and tomorrow we gather at 7:30 am in the Atrium for breakfast and then convene at 8:00 am in the Auditorium for our first gathering of the new school year. If you were pleasantly surprised by last year’s makeover of the space, wait until you see what this summer’s renovations has brought!

While most of us take at least a short vacation during the summer, with time to travel, visit family and friends, and decompress from the school year, our faithful Wai Mun Fong enjoys no such respite. From the day the faculty departed last June, SSIS has been alive with the sounds of hammers, saws, and shovels. Some of the changes will be immediately obvious, some are more “under the hood,” but all require tremendous planning and watchfulness and we are grateful to Wai Mun and her team for their hard work.

Our new faculty have been here since the third week of July. Most are settled in apartments around PMH or moving in this week, and the entire admin team is excited for our returning teachers to meet them. We will introduce them all at tomorrow’s opening session and we know our returning teachers will help bring the new staff even closer into the family of SSIS faculty over the next few weeks.

My daughters, Alex and Lea, joined nineteen other SSIS students, and returned this summer to the Saigon South English Camp held at the Hiep Phuoc Middle School in June. The program is in its second year and is an example of the community service cooperation between SSIS and Lawrence Ting. I should mention that supervision of the program, and the adult volunteers who help out each year, is in the hands of Wai Mun Fong (who seems never to sleep). Again this year, Gayle Tsien, our board chair, spent her annual leave days as one of those parent volunteers at the camp for Vietnamese students.

The Syltes take two weeks in the summer as private time for our family. This year our travels took us to Edinburgh and London. London I have visited before (usual on teacher recruitment trips with little chance to leave the hotel), but Edinburgh was an entirely new experience and I have long wanted to walk its streets for reasons I will soon mention. It’s a fairly small city compared to the large capital cities and hubs of Asia, with a population under half a million. Our family toured a bit of the University of Edinburgh (as well as took a day trip up to the University of St Andrews), dove into bookshops and galleries, and sampled the cuisine.

My personal fascination with Scotland dates back to my days teaching AP European History and European Intellectual History. In 2001, an American historian, Arthur L. Herman, wrote a book modestly entitled How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything. In this work, Herman explores how Scotland, a backwater in 1707 when it ratified the Act of Union with England, went forth to have an enormous impact on the world’s intellectual, economic, cultural, and industrial development over the course of the 18^th and 19^th century, far out of proportion to the country’s size and population.

One obvious question is this: How did a nation as small as Scotland achieve such a phenomenal reach and influence? The answer, from Professor Herman, was its educational system. Thinkers such as Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations), Frances Hutcheson, and David Hume (Treatise on Human Nature) were the progenitors of ideas that spread widely throughout the world, including Hume’s influence on James Madison and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. The ideas of classical liberalism and titans such as Alexander Graham Bell, Sir Walter Scott, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Napier, James Watt, and Lord Kelvin all were birthed in Scotland.

Why is this relevant to SSIS? Here we are neither among the largest of the international schools, nor is Vietnam yet a world center in line with Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Singapore. As teachers, though, we aspire to offer an education which will prepare our students to move on in the world and to change it, we hope for the better. We believe that good education, properly understand to encompass the promise of all our Core Values of Academic Excellence, a Sense of Self, Dedicated Service, Balance in Life, and Respect for All, transforms the individual and magnifies his or her ability to contribute to the surrounding world.

Over the past three years we have been focusing our attention on our understanding and incorporation of our Core Values into all aspects of the School, the refinement and development of a powerful written, taught, and assessed curriculum, and our community engagement with our students, parents, faculty, and host country. All these will continue this year, along with some exiting new directions that we’ll talk about during the first semester.

This will be an incredibly exciting year in the life of SSIS. We are engaged in a full WASC Reaccreditation (March visit), chaired by Tina Fossgreen and Molly Burger. We will host Learning 2.0 (October), the Vietnam Tech Conference (February), and the English Language Learning Specialists in Asia (ELLSA) conference in April.

I am privileged to work amongst such a talented group of faculty and I look forward to having you all back on campus tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Mark Sylte

Head of School