George Bernard Shaw thought that having to go to school unnecessarily "interrupts" a person's education. But he wasn't at Lake Tuggeranong College on Thursday to be contrary and curmudgeonly, as the praises of ACT public schools were sung.
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He would have been the only person not singing from Thursday's hymn sheet at the official launch of the ACT Public Schools Alumni website.*
The Alumni celebrates the achievements of the ACT public education system in turning out "students of note". Names that got bandied about at Thursday's event (the sun streaming in to the spacious venue through windows beyond which Lake Tuggeranong was looking almost Mediterraneanly lovely) included Gough Whitlam, Jackie Chan the Hollywood Kung Fu guru, Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and Olympians Lauren Jackson and Patrick "Paddy" Mills.
The debate about public and private schools (about governments giving public money to the already sumptuous schools of the children of gentlefolk) is sometimes so passionate that we'd hoped Minister for Education and Training Joy Burch might give an impassioned speech. After all the new site does seem to be sticking up for the working-class David of public education, saying that its products are just as good as the products of the well-heeled private school Goliaths.
Alas, though, if she has an inner-Socialist (does anyone in today's post-Gough Labor Party have such a thing?) she kept it tightly leashed. She did say, promisingly, at the start of her speech that a good public education system is "the hallmark of a good society". But that was as Marxist-Leninist as she got.
Gough Whitlam (Telopea Park School) is no longer with us but Thursday's occasion boasted three living advertisements for ACT public education. They were distinguished journalist Karen Middleton (Belconnen High, Hawker College), dancer and dance teacher and choreographer Holly Diggle (Alfred Deakin High School, Narrabundah College), and dancer, choreographer and community activist Francis Owusu (Lake Tuggeranong College).
In our picture Francis Owusu is cavorting with another ACT student of note, rapper Tim Omaji, aka Timomatic (Narrabundah College).
Readers will all be familiar with Gareth Evans' joke (and sincere observation) "Why does everyone take an instant dislike to Bronwyn Bishop? Because it saves time later on." I thought of this on Thursday as, talking to dancer Francis Owusu, I took an instant liking to him, feeling sure this would save time later on.
The CEO of Kulture Break, a charity youth services provider with a focus on community arts and youth empowerment, is a most engaging man. He is also, from his energetic, indiarubber body language, someone you know is a dancer even before you're told it. I could imagine him running, laughing, up one wall of our hall, across its ceiling, and down its other wall.
He didn't do that but he did rejoice to me and then to all of us about his experience of Lake Tuggeranong College.
"I remember the first day!" he enthused.
He'd come from a swish, inhibited private school and on his first day, to the amusement of others, heard himself calling his Tuggeranong teachers "Sir".
"And also when I began here I was amazed at how much freedom you had here as a college! You could walk across to the mall! You could come and go when you wanted! I'd come from a school where you literally had to be there from 9 till 3.30. But here I was, in the college's basketball team and I'd hang out. Go to the mall. Cruise around. Cruise to the gym!"
He remembered with gratitude the vital day when he cruised past the College's careers' adviser's office window once too often and was hauled in for a frank talk about how cruising ruined his (Owusu's) academic performance. The pupil responded promptly. "I got my head down and my bum up. I graduated and I went to university and turned things around."
Now, he mused, he was in the very same business of turning young people's hitherto aimlessly cruising lives around, urging them to be the best they could be. And so being back at the College for Thursday's occasion felt to him like "coming full circle".
Holly Diggle remembered how she'd spent some of her high school years estranged from Canberra, in Scotland, and then how, coming back to Canberra for years 9 and 10, she was "dazzled by the array of subjects available to me at high school" here. It was an array not dreamt of in the Scottish system.
Here in Canberra at high school there was even photography, and dance, and from that high school dance opportunity she'd been given confidence and opportunities galore. She said she'd been blessed by some terrific teachers here (on Thursday she rather movingly named them and thanked them). All in all, she thought she'd had great good fortune in being educated in the ACT public system.
"It enabled me to go off into the world, and follow my dreams. And that's what I've done."
Seen through the windows the eerily pretty waters of Lake Tuggeranong (Owusu told us that it looked far cleaner than when he'd been a student beside it 12 years ago) seemed to take on an extra, applauding sparkle as Holly Diggle spoke so sparklingly about our city and its schools.
The star-studded ACT Public Schools Alumni roll (with ACT public schools urged to continuously nominate students of note to add to it) is at http://www.det.act.gov.au/canberra-public-school-alumni
