 Speech
by His Highness the Aga Khan
Speech by His Highness
the Aga Khan at the Foundation
Stone-Laying Ceremony of The Aga Khan Academy,
Hyderabad, India, 22nd September 2006
Your
Excellency the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh
Honorable Ministers
Distinguished Guests
Ladies And Gentlemen
Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim
Let me begin by thanking all of you for honoring us by joining
in this celebration – at this truly magnificent site.
We are most deeply grateful to all who helped to make this
site available to our Academy program. Your generosity will
be a continuing inspiration to us all.
Our celebration today is part of a long,
unfolding story. It is, for me, a highly personal story
– growing out of my family’s active involvement
through the years in the field of education – especially
in the developing world.
It was just about a century ago that my
grandfather, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah Aga Khan, began to
build a network of educational institutions in places where
the Ismaili community had settled. This network would eventually
include some 300 schools – 200 of which my grandfather
opened personally.
In addition, he was the founding figure
of Aligarh University, and I have continued that tradition
through the establishment of the Aga Khan University and
the University of Central Asia.
The tradition I am describing, however,
goes back much further than one hundred years. For it was
some one thousand years ago that my forefathers, the Fatimid
Imam-Caliphs of Egypt, founded Al-Azhar University and the
Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. For well over a millennium,
the pursuit of knowledge has been a central element in our
tradition.
Against this background, you can understand
why this new educational beginning means so much to us.
But even while we renew a rich tradition
inherited from the past, we are also looking deeply into
the future. What we begin here may not have its full impact
in any of our lifetimes. But the beginnings we undertake
today may well be among the most important things we will
ever do.
I would like to speak initially about the
logic behind the Aga Khan Academies program – to look
at its philosophical underpinnings. For unless those foundations
are sound, whatever we build will be inherently vulnerable.
We are taking our time in laying those foundations.
We are designing for the long-range future and we have thought
long and hard about our goals and how to achieve them. We
have launched research projects and surveys. We have done
our homework.
At the very heart of our conclusions –
is one, central conviction: the key to future progress in
the developing world will be its ability to identify, to
develop, and to retain expert and effective home-grown leadership.
In our lifetimes, the developing world has
looked in various directions for the key to progress. For
a while, it was thought to be enough that indigenous peoples
simply throw off the yoke of colonialism – which for
some was the most important barrier to fulfillment and progress.
This viewpoint often evolved into a hope that reasserting
cultural identity would unlock the future – and education
sometimes became mainly a matter of tapping into ancient
wisdom, expressed in distinctive languages. In many places,
the promises of a charismatic ruler also captured the public
imagination – the mystique of the romantic hero –
and public education sometimes slipped into relative insignificance.
Over time, as frustration mounted, other
cures were entertained in parts of the developing world.
Ideologies of the left and the right came into vogue –
ranging from the siren songs of state socialism on one side
to the allure of unrestrained capitalism on the other. The
demands of dogma came to replace the disciplines of reason
– and education too often turned into indoctrination.
But none of these approaches proved adequate
to the demands of their times – and all of them seem
increasingly inadequate to the demands of the present. A
different approach has been needed. I would note that the
people of this city and this region were among those who
first came to realize this fact – and to respond impressively
to the challenge.
That response – here and elsewhere
– has had, as its centerpiece, a distinctive intellectual
style and a creative approach to leadership. As the pace
of history has accelerated, agility and adaptability have
become more important qualities than mere size or strength,
and the race of life has gone increasingly to the nimble
and the knowledgeable.
As the economic arena has been globalizing,
openness and flexibility have become prerequisites for progress,
and success has gone more and more to those who can connect
and respond.
Specialized expertise, pragmatic temperament,
mental resourcefulness – these are increasingly the
keys to effective leadership – along with a capacity
for intellectual humility which keeps one’s mind constantly
open to a variety of viewpoints and welcomes pluralistic
exchange.
In such a world, the most important thing
a student can learn is the ability to keep on learning.
What these developments mean is human resources
have become more important than natural resources in determining
the wealth of a society. And yet, there are still too many
communities in which the true potential of the human resource
base is sadly underdeveloped.
Too many of those who ought to be leading
their communities in the hopeful world of tomorrow, are
being left behind in the real world of today. Because good
schools are not available to them early in life, they are
often blocked from such opportunities as they grow older.
And even those who do break through, into a world of wider
educational opportunity, too often also break out –
and leave their home regions. The result is a widening gap
between the expert and effective leadership these communities
need – and the leadership their educational systems
are likely to deliver.
Am I saying that we should focus only on
educating a leadership elite? Not by any means. Broad public
education is still an essential obligation of a just society.
But I also believe that the best interests of every society
will be best served if its future leaders can be adequately
prepared for an unusually demanding future – if its
outstanding students, in short, can be given an outstanding
education.
Every society develops and depends on some
set of leaders – but the great question is how those
leaders are developed and chosen. For much of human history,
leaders were born into their roles, or they fought their
way in – or they bought their way in. Elites were
normally based on physical power, or accumulated wealth,
or inherited claims to authority.
But social progress can be greatest when
aristocracies of class give way to aristocracies of talent
– or to use an even better term – to meritocracies.
The well-led society of the future, in my
view, will be a meritocracy – where leadership roles
are based on personal and intellectual excellence.
Our goal, then, is not to provide special
education for a privileged elite – but to provide
an exceptional education for the truly exceptional.
This is the fundamental philosophy undergirding
our Academies program.
How, then, will these goals be realized
in practice? In all candor, some of our plans may have few
precedents in this country and may strike some observers
here as new and distinctive. But we have seen them tested
in other contexts and believe they represent worthwhile
challenges.
Our plans begin with the realization that
governments alone cannot meet the educational challenges
of the 21st century. Nor can private institutions which
are constrained by the necessity to earn a profit. The answer
lies in the expanding role of civil society – in voluntary
institutions which are not governmental but which are nonetheless
dedicated to community values and the public good. We hope
that the Aga Khan Academies will become leading exemplars
of civil society’s potential role.
Access to these schools (each of which will
enroll 700 to 1200 young men and women) will thus be based
solely on merit – not on financial resources. Intellectual
capacity and intrinsic character will determine not only
who is admitted, but who is actively recruited – for
matriculation at these schools must go beyond passive selection
and include an active outreach effort.
Once admitted, students will pursue a diverse
and balanced curriculum, one which will evolve constantly
as learning expands at an unprecedented pace. The best schools
of the future will be those which select wisely just what
learning will best help prepare students for an unpredictable
future.
Our curriculum will be designed to qualify
students for the widely-respected International Baccalaureate
degree – and beyond that, for admission to the very
best university programs that may interest them –
in India and in every part of the world.
The International Baccalaureate program
will help us prepare students to meet world-class standards
– joining a community of some 1800 other schools who
use the IB framework, including highly respected institutions
here in India. Using that framework, we can ensure that
the education we provide will be tied to global concerns
and keep pace with global developments.
But the Aga Khan Academies will also have
their own areas of special emphasis, including: an explicit
concern for the value of pluralism, a strong emphasis on
the ethical dimensions of life, a more specialized knowledge
of how global economics work, and a focus on comparative
political systems.
We are often told these days that tension
and violence in much of the world grows out of some fundamental
clash of civilizations – especially a clash between
the Islamic world and the West. I disagree with that assessment.
In my view, it is a clash of ignorances which is to blame.
The Academies will seek to remedy such ignorances through
the broad study of a variety of world cultures, including
the Study of Muslim Civilizations, a subject which is often
overlooked in some parts of the world today.
The principal language of instruction will
be English – today’s primary language of global
connection. But connectedness will also be enhanced in other
ways. Every graduate will at least be bilingual, for example,
and many will be trilingual. In his or her home Academy,
a student will not only meet other students from a variety
of cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds – but
they will get to know one another as friends and neighbors
– something that residential schools are well-equipped
to foster. And many will study for at least a year outside
their home cultures, as well.
Each of our Academies can be thought of,
in sum, as a center for cross-cultural education. And the
City of Hyderabad, with its rich history as a meeting point
for different cultures, including the Christian, Hindu and
Muslim traditions, will provide a particularly appropriate
setting.
The spirit of pluralism will be further
enhanced by the fact that each Academy will be part of a
larger network. All of them will be linked electronically
and will serve students and faculty throughout the system
through video-conferencing and other distance learning technology--as
well as through programs whereby teachers and students will
work for a time in a distant setting.
Building a global network of Academies will
enable us to pursue simultaneously two sometimes divergent
goals. On the one hand we want our students to understand
and appreciate the variety of the world and the diversity
of its peoples. On the other hand, we want to ensure a certain
consistency in the quality of instruction and in the pursuit
of core values. Building a wide network of schools around
the same fundamental principles will allow us to pursue
both of these objectives.
There will be one teacher for about every
seven students at our Academies, and the teachers will not
only be actively recruited, carefully selected and equitably
compensated, but they will also be expertly trained and
continually retrained. World class standards are ever-evolving
standards—staying on the cutting edge is a not a static
process. Not only will we need highly professional instructors,
but we must also be sure that our instructors are well-instructed.
State-of-the art teaching technologies will help our faculties
as they reach for this goal.
In short, we seek not only to train the
next generation of expert leaders, but also to develop a
professional corps of world-class teachers. Emblematic of
this commitment is the fact that a Professional Development
Center, focused on the improvement of teaching, will be
part of the central Academic Building on each of our campuses.
If all goes well, teachers at the Aga Khan Academies will
become role models not only for their students, but for
other teachers in their communities.
We also realize, as I have already suggested,
that much of what our students will learn over time they
will learn from one another – not only in formal classroom
settings but in residential and social contexts, in a wide
range of extracurricular activities and in community service
projects, as well. The Academies will be concerned with
the whole of the human being – mind, body and spirit
– and with the broad range of human aspiration –
intellectual, moral, artistic, physical and spiritual. The
fact that these are residential academies will contribute
enormously to these broad objectives, encouraging students
to identify more completely with the school, to help lead
it and shape its environment.
We envision that our graduates will emerge
as well rounded men and women, enriched by their participation
not only in rich learning communities but in rich living
communities as well.
All of these commitments imply a special
emphasis on the quality of our physical resources –
on the built environment, as it is often called –
including the quality of architectural design. As it has
so often been said, we first shape our buildings, and then
they shape us.
In sum, the Academies will be serious, focused,
rigorous environments – but at the same time they
will be spacious and joyous places. They will operate on
the cutting edge of knowledge and pedagogy, but they will
be rooted in history and steeped in tradition.
It is such an institution that I hope to
bring to the city of Hyderabad.
Thank You.
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