School business plan makes sense
Okay, I am not going to lie.
I was startled to hear that a school attended by generations of British Royalty in the wilds of northeast Scotland was opening its only satellite franchise right here in the Annapolis Valley. And, this notfor profit venture is counting on parents from far away to fork over $67,800 annually so their kids can be educated in a place where that money buys an undergraduate university degree.
For a while all I could envision were clashes of cultures — overalled Valley farmers and sons of Mumbai millionaires lining up together at the Tims — worthy of a sitcom.
Then I thumbed through the business plan for Gordonstoun Nova Scotia and it started to make sense.
From the looks of it, E. A. Far- ren Ltd., the New Brunswick-based consortium, will develop and operate the school, figures that wellheeled folks from places like China, India and Europe want their kids to study somewhere that offers clean, wide-open spaces and the full support of the municipal and provincial governments, along with a nearby university with which the school can partner.
It matters that few distractions are found between Bridgetown and Annapolis Royal, which is as much as we know about where the school will be built.
Lawrence Powell, reporter at SaltWire Network’s sister publication the Annapolis County Spectator, notes the area has no big-box stores and no medium-or-heavy industry, and besides a pair of Tim Hortons restaurants and a single Subway shop, is devoid of fast food franchises.
It’s just a theory, but a school founded by Kurt Hahn, who also started the Outward Bound Program and the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, may like the notion that its affiliate is located in the oldest European-settled area in Canada.
As Powell also pointed out in this paper, Gordonstoun, Scotland, was the home of Sir Robert Gordon, Scotland’s first Baronet of Nova Scotia.
Nobody, either in the business plan or at the weekend news conference, came out and explicitly said it, but another factor could be at work here.
The school’s founding principles — which include engendering “an enterprising curiosity within individuals” and “understanding and compassion for others” — also talk about building “an undefeatable spirit in meeting challenges,” a “tenacity in the pursuit of goals” and “readiness for sensible selfdenial.”
Spartan qualities like those last three aren’t acquired in posh settings. There’s a reason that Prince Charles, who attended Gordonstoun, called the Scottish school “Colditz in Kilts,” a reference to a German Second World War prisoner compound.
In my view, New Scotland, where so many of us still live close to the land and the elements, offers challenges worthy of Old Scotland.
I’m not just talking about our terrain — the icy, powerful waters of the Bay of Fundy, the craggy shoreline, the highlands of Cape Breton — that will remind any Scot of home.
Our defining historical myths and stories are all about courage and endurance: The Acadians being expelled from their lands, Joshua Slocum sailing around the world alone, Madame La Tour forced to stand and watch as Charles de Menou d’Aulnay ordered the hanging of every one of the men who had defended her fort. Halifax is known to the world for its great harbour and its role as a staging point in so many wars, but, as much as anything, for how the city rebuilt itself after the great explosion.
In this province, the black Loyalists of Birchtown, after enduring the horrors of slavery in the American colonies, landed, and finding life little better, decamped to Africa where they established the first colony of freed slaves there.
Here, thousands have lost their lives when their ships went down and the underground mines in which they worked exploded and caved in.
Some of these demonstrations of grit and resolve happened near where the new boarding school will be located: across the Bay of Fundy at the mouth of the Saint Croix River where, under the auspices of the King of France, one of the first year-round French colonial outposts on the new continent was attempted to be founded in the summer of 1604.
When the thaw arrived next March, half of the 79 colonists had died from scurvy, leaving the rest to limp back across the bay where Samuel de Champlain, the expedition’s cartographer, remembered from his wanderings, “one of the most beautiful harbours I have seen on all of these coasts.”
The first students at Gordonstoun, expected in 2020, will get a chance to see that harbour, the nearby historic town of Annapolis Royal, and so many other places where history has unfolded around here.
They may notice a whiff of something different in the air, too, a smell that Kurt Hahn himself might recognize.