Coordinator for Education Message

Victor Hugo once famously remarked "He who opens a school door, closes a prison." Education today is not merely opening the minds of our learners to academic excellence alone, but also nurturing the values in their impressionable minds, while they can yet be moulded. The current pandemic has revealed both the dark and the bright side of human nature. It has thrown mankind into a whirlpool of confusion, turning our lives on our heads, but it's chaos has also compelled us to look into the hollowness of our society, the dark abyss of our selfishness from which we still need to be liberated. It is said "Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today." and rightly so. There are deep and insightful lessons to be learnt from our new situation, and from there on, we need to embark on a new journey of bringing to birth - a new world, with new sets of values that place a premium on respect for nature, sustaining its ecosystems, building networks of humane communities, and above all putting others before us. "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire" said the famous poet W. B Yeats. Let us pledge ourselves to be illuminated by this new humanism that needs to engulf the world, and let this fire be ignited in turn, in the hearts and minds of the students we nurture, so that even after our students having left the portals of our institution, the following words of Albert Einstein may resonate forth: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school". It is our ardent hope that the education we strive to impart may stay with them for life. May the young lives we nurture today at St. Francis Xavier's, be the shining stars of tomorrow.

From the desk of the Coordinator for Education, Education Apostolate

Sd

Fr. Dominick Falcao, sfx