We are one-third of the way through this year’s UK Schools Programme, the topic being ‘Vision and Values’. The team is traditionally international: Howard Grace invited Sandra Lapkovska from Riga, Latvia, and myself (Tatiana Sokolova, Novosibirsk, Russia), for three months.
So far we have visited 20 schools with 40 more to come. We are extraordinarily different people, Sandra and myself. Sandra is eighteen and has just finished high school. She spent eighteen months studying in Norway and Denmark and is now taking a year off, hoping to gain a better vision of what her calling is in life.
I’m in the fourth year studying International Business. We are both involved with youth NGOs in our countries: Sandra is a member of Club the House, promoting the ideas of a united Europe among Latvian young people; I work with Youth Humanitarian Initiative, a Foundations For Freedom regional team. Over here it’s a great chance to zoom out and get a better perspective of what we are doing, and to think, and think really hard, about the vision we have for our countries and our lives.
You never know what you are going to say in a school session until you have actually said it; you never know what the audience is going to be like and where the discussion will lead, so you can’t go to a school with a ready-made speech. You have to learn to be flexible, to be challenged and to surprise yourself. In the sessions, we speak about Gandhi and Martin Luther King (or rather stimulate the students to say all they know about them) as examples of people having vision (“I have a dream”) and values (“Be the change you want to see in the world”). We touch on motivation; the value of living on the give versus living on the get; personal vision for one’s life and a vision for a whole society; but most importantly, we hope that we leave people to think what changes in their lives they want to see. A tricky question that we ask is ‘Would you recommend your society in the UK to Russia or Latvia as something to aspire to?’ which is, after all, not as much about the Eastern European system versus the Western one, but more about Britain itself. It’s not always easy when it comes to getting the answer. We’ve been in Berkshire for three weeks, and now we are based in London. We can see how schools and young people differ in different areas. Idealistic as it may sound, we hope to find universal values to guide us along the path together.
Tanja Sokolova
English