Peter Jackson for Principal

Peter Jackson Director 

I’ve always thought it would be interesting to follow successful creative people back to their schools to see how well they were accepted and how much their education contributed, or hindered, their development. It would be interesting to see where their passion for their vocation came from.

From what I have heard and read, and from my personal experience of others, those with a talent have discovered it early and have held on to their dream to succeed no matter what. I guess those with less talent, or less opportunity, lose their dreams and settle for what life offers them. Thee are so many stories of creative people being unsuccessful at school but succeeding in their chosen area that it would be worth the effort to ask them for their views.

I wonder what Peter Jackson was like at school and how he holds it in his memory. And I wonder what seminal influences, people and opportunities inspired him to take the course ho did?

Whatever, the metaphor of the film director is a powerful one, and one that fits well with leadership qualities the future will require. Leaders need a passion to do something they feel is very important to them. Such creative people have a desire to create impossible to ignore and to realize their dream they need to work with a range of other equally talented people.

A director’s key role is to create the conditions to get the very best out everyone involved and to cast the people in the film to take advantage of their strengths. A lot of this must be intuitive but an intuition honed by previous experience. And the interesting thing is, that at the end of the film, all the various contributors go their own way never to all work together again in the same configuration.

Other directors will select them for their various talents and the cycle continues.

This is how I imagine work in the future to be like. Success will depend on the talents each person develops and the contacts and relationships they make.

It would be interesting if film directors were to run our schools. I think they would value each person’s potential talent more than current school principals do. Such leaders would 'attract' their pupils. Schools could be established by people with particular interests and students could choose whatever schools they want to attend.

There are signs of this approach developing in many parts of the world now. Perhaps current schools have achieved all they can in their current format and that one day we will look back on traditional school buildings and say, ‘How did teenagers manage to stay in such places so long?’

I think if we asked creative people in any areas of endeavor about how to develop schools to develop whatever talents students have, they would provide us with some interesting ideas.