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The Cranbrook Chronicle
From Studies
Term 2 Assessments
– Years 7 to 10
The Years 7 to 10 assessment periods start
next week.
Dates for tasks are on the Year group
calendar, and specific advice about each task
is located on the subject page.
Don’t forget about the study tips advice on
the Portal too:
Cranbrook School subscribes to the ELES
Study Skills Handbook. This online resource
contains information and interactive
activities. Access to the Handbook is
available at
http://www.studyskillshandbook.com.au
User name and password on the Portal
(Year group home page)
Absence from assessment tasks:
Departments arrange catch-up testing
for boys absent – a reminder that boys
must bring a diary note from his parent
or guardian if in Yrs 7 – 8 explaining his
legitimate absence (illness or misadventure);
a doctor’s certificate is required for Yrs 9
and 10 students. Rules governing lateness
and absence due to illness are in the relevant
year Curriculum Outlines, provided in hard
copy earlier in the year, on the portal, and
referred to in the student diary (p 104) or
portal/curriculum and assessment
Term 2 semester reports
Years 7 to 10 receive full reports at the end of
term – attitude and achievement outcomes,
performance grades and quartiles, teacher
academic and pastoral comment, cocurricular
information. Years 11 and
12, and Year 10/11 accelerants, receive
progress reports - attitude and achievement
outcomes, task ranks for those tasks held
this term.
HSC Trial Examination
Timetable
The Trials are held in Weeks 1 and 2 of next
term, starting day 1. The timetable and rules
governing assessments and examinations
will be available on the portal next week.
Boys must familiarise themselves with the
rules covering examinations and assessment
– the rules on the portal and those in the
HSC Assessment Guide.
Once published, any Year 12 student or Year
11 accelerant who has a problem with the
timetable in terms of clashes, must see Mr
Givney as a matter of urgency.
Ronno’s RAve
Esse quam videri
Mr Ronaldson, Head of English
(Special Programs)
The Headmaster and staff are in the process
of rethinking the School’s mission statement
and in doing so have been discussing the
significance of our motto. Courtesy of the
magic of Wikipedia, I offer the following
facts and then add some observations of my
own.
At one of the Headmaster’s recent staff
breakfasts, called to facilitate the abovementioned
discussion, I asked did anyone
know where our motto originated. None of
those present did, so a modicum of ‘research’
– the Internet makes research so easy that
one hesitates to use the word – reveals the
following: the phrase is found in Cicero and
also in Sallust.
‘Esse quam videri is found in Cicero’s essay
“On Friendship” (“De amicitia”, chapter 98).
“Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti
esse quam videri volunt” (Few are those who
wish to be endowed with virtue rather than
to seem so).
‘Just a few years after Cicero, Sallust used
the phrase in his “Bellum Catilinae” (54.6),
writing that Cato the Younger “esse quam
videri bonus malebat” (He preferred to be
good rather than to seem so).
‘ Previous to both Romans, Aeschylus used
a similar phrase in “Seven Against Thebes” at
line 592, at which the scout (angelos) says of
the seer/priest Amphiaraos: “ou gar dokein
aristos, all’ einai theile” (his resolve is not
to seem the best but in fact to be the best).
Plato quoted this line in “Republic” (361b).
‘In “The Prince”, Niccolò Machiavelli
reverses this phrase to videri quam esse (to
seem rather than to be) with respect to how
a ruler ought to act.’ Wikipedia, ‘esse quam
videri’
Wikipedia lists something like 95
institutions and schools that have the motto
as their own, including Darwin High School,
Dubbo High School and Hermitage House
at Geelong Grammar School. It is also the
motto of North Carolina.
We all know the obvious meaning: ‘it is
better to be than seem to be’, and again,
the moral seems obvious: ‘it is better to be
honest/to have integrity than to be deceitful/
to be a hypocrite’. Yet these interpretations
point to a question inherent in the motto:
‘to be… what exactly?’ We assume it means
‘to be honest’ or ‘to have integrity’ but these
are assumptions. Cicero makes it clear that
very few actually wish to be ‘endowed with
virtue’; Sallust attaches the word ‘bonus’ –
‘good’.
In Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, Polonius makes
the famous observation to his son: ‘to
thine own self be true’ – and yet Polonius
is a long winded, sycophantic buffoon. He
is murdered while spying on the Crown
Prince.
So the question remains ‘to be – what?’ If,
like Polonius, you are true to yourself ‘then it
follows, as night follows day, thou canst not
be false to any man’. But what if that empty
moral category, one’s self, ‘being’, is evil or
corrupt? Adolf Hitler was true to himself,
so was Joseph Stalin. Hitler appeared to be
a peacemaker: Joseph Chamberlain came
back from Munich waving a worthless
piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on
it, proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. It was
not long before the true ‘being’ of Hitler
replaced the ‘seeming’.
So, while there is undoubted virtue in
honesty, the quality and nature of what one
is honest about is surely equally if not more
important.
Then there is also the question of ‘seeming’.
Plato wished to banish poets and artists
from his Republic because they were two
removes from the truth: there was God’s
ideal truth; then the copy of this truth in
‘reality’; then the copy of this ‘reality’ in the
work of the artist or poet. In other words he
banned ‘seeming’.
Wikipedia quotes Machiavelli as advocating
seeming over being in his advice to Princes
– deceptiveness is necessary in public
policy. We see this every day in our modern
politics; how often do politicians prevaricate,
obfuscate, in short, lie?
Good manners rely on ‘seeming’. I may
suppress my true feelings or opinions in
order not to hurt someone else’s. I may seem
to be agreeable in order to survive and thrive
in a particular social context.
Plato’s idealism portrays our so-called reality
as a form of seeming – to quote the King
James Bible: ‘we see through a glass, darkly’.
Many religions and philosophies see reality
as a kind of dream or shadow, an illusion:
a ‘seeming’. Existentialism sees ‘being’ as a
void, nothingness. Civilisation is based on a
striving to seem, teetering on the edge of the
abyss of being.
And Plato was right, surely: ‘seeming’ is
of the essence in art. While the actor may
strive for ‘truth’ in his or her performance,
he or she is still acting, putting on a show,
‘seeming’.
So while I admire and respect our School’s
motto, I repeat – what is it that we want to
‘be’? And isn’t there are at least some merit
in the practice of ‘seeming’?
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