QBE Academy is about "learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable"

By Wes Green
From the book about QBE Academy

I was a student at Aiglon College in the 1970s. I met Will Sutherland in his first year as a teacher there when we wound up in the same house. Will went on to serve as a housemaster for 17 years and devised a system for developing character- and life-skills in teenagers based in large part on the philosophy and long experience of the school’s founder, John Corlette.

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Currently, I am serving as an advisor to Will’s ambitious project, The QBE European Leadership School—mostly to help him set up a marketing operation in the United States, but also to share my experience running “micro-multinationals.” Anyone who has started a business knows how hard it is to get one off the ground, but an entrepreneur soon learns it’s often even more difficult to manage growth. Every day it seems you whipsaw between concern and panic. Large companies manage profits. Small companies are forced to manage cashflow. They learn to operate on shoestrings. In fact, the REAL creativity most entrepreneurs need is not a talent for coming up with some brilliant idea for a business, but figuring out how to keep a small company afloat and headed in the right direction. Suffice it to say, if you’re going to take the plunge, you might as well bet your time, health, and capital on something you care deeply about.

And that brings us to Will’s project. I’m not an educationalist. But I am a parent. And I’ve been in educational publishing most of my life. So I have my opinions. Over the last few decades the industrialized West has seen the stagnation of its middle class. Globalization brought on by the introduction of the intermodal shipping container, technology, and international trade agreements has rendered geography irrelevant. That means you don’t just compete with somebody down the street for a job these days, you compete with people around the globe. That’s a daunting prospect. Marketplace inefficiencies that the middle class exploited over the centuries to make money are daily being squeezed out of the economy. And perhaps most noteworthy is the economic osmosis brought about by globalization. While the American and European middle classes have hit a wall, some 150 million people in China alone have entered the middle class. What’s not so good for some has been very good for others. In reaction, policymakers here in the U.S. are scrambling to reinvent our educational system. Their solution: in order to be more competitive, they want to turn higher education into vocational education. And accordingly, schools are changing their curricula to stress job training.

But surely education is about much more than that. It’s about learning how to think about things. About ideas. About different perspectives. About seeing new possibilities, and thus about inspiration. Yeats once famously said that education is not about the filling of a pail, it’s about the lighting of a fire. I think he’s right. There’s not much we can do about new trends in education. But there’s something we can do to keep the flame of experiential education burning. Will’s project, like John Corlette’s Aiglon, is about testing limits. It’s about learning through difficult, often exhausting outdoor expeditions that we’re capable of much more than we think we are. It’s about learning to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable. About tenacity, compassion, collaboration, and thinking creatively. In short, it’s about dispelling the parochialism of both the spirit and mind. That’s a project worth supporting, especially in today’s educational climate.

For those interested in learning more about the benefits of experiential education, visit JohnCorlette.com and download the collection of speeches and meditations by Corlette called Our Lives are What We Make of Them.