A Past For The Future

Education, School

July 1, 2018, 11:56 am

“Unlike many other countries, the UAE’s progress has been built on its leaders’ emphasis on peace and tolerance.”

“True wisdom can be learnt from the past, living in the present and looking forward to the future.”

Here at Jumeira Baccalaureate School (JBS), a Taaleem school, we firmly believe that the UAE government’s Year of Zayed initiative is a wonderful way of capturing the next generation’s imagination to understand and appreciate the amazing progress that the UAE has made in just a few decades, and to inspire them to dream big dreams as Sheikh Zayed did.

Unlike many other countries, the UAE’s progress has been built on its leaders’ emphasis on peace and tolerance, a fact that we believe is crucial for students to understand in order to grasp why the UAE is the country it is today and to take it forward with them, wherever their lives may take them in the future.

As a school that is at the heart of the Jumeira 1 community, we are privileged to be educating many children whose entire family’s heritage is deeply-rooted in Dubai and the UAE.

Some may be the children of long-term expatriate families, while others are local Emirati families.  We wanted to find a way to give students an opportunity to learn more about how Sheikh Zayed’s legacy lives on in their community, which is why we are conducting Zayed’s Living History – an oral history project – throughout 2018.

Over the course of the Year of Zayed, students at the school are interviewing and recording the viewpoints of Emiratis from different walks of life about Dubai’s ‘then and now’, to learn more about the impact of the late leader.

They are also interviewing the expatriate population to discover more about their views on how Sheikh Zayed impacted the UAE’s world-renowned multicultural society.

Most recently our students were fortunate enough to interview His Excellency Khamis Bin Butti Al Rumaithy, former minister of the Office of His Highness the President of the UAE, and a close personal friend of Sheikh Zayed. His Excellency taught the students a number of key lessons about how Sheikh Zayed built the UAE and passed on his wisdom and wishes for the future of the country.

The collection of students’ interviews will be used in our Moral Education and History lessons as key primary source material to help inspire future leadership in the children for years to come.

Our English students have also been involved in the project, writing editorial content based on the project which was recently featured in Gulf News as part of their Young Editors project, in partnership with the KHDA.

As one of our Grade 9 students, Aya Abdel Rahman, recently commented about Zayed’s Living History: “True wisdom can be learnt from the past, living in the present and looking forward to the future.” We hope that JBS’s Year of Zayed initiative will help our students to do all three.