Zsolt Berczelédi
'Teaching is not just a task or a job, but a profession.'
I have always preferred giving to receiving, and I have always been driven by the joy of creation and valuable work. Teaching and passing on knowledge is a huge challenge – it involves getting to know the student and the person behind the student, understanding their way of thinking and motivations, arousing their thirst for knowledge, and finally quenching it by passing on to them the greatest gift of knowing. Those who are motivated by curiosity and inquisitiveness, by an ambition to keep learning new things about the world, are on the right track.
When I teach, I have a lot of positive experience and feedback to build on. When I see how successful my students are at exams and in real life, or when I just catch a glimpse of understanding in a student’s eyes after I have been trying to explain something to them for a while, I am happy about their experience of success.
As Headmaster, it is my conviction that our school must not be some kind of factory to train champions and competitors, where the only things that matter are individual success and excellent results. Rather, the school must be an institution that is naturally integrated into the students’ lives, and where they can be prepared for what lies ahead of them in real life. We must enable our students to become independent, responsible and critical but open-minded individuals, who strive for happiness and harmony in their adult life.
In our educational work we wish to prepare our students for life and the “real world.” As such, it is vital that we equip them with a value system and set of skills that will help them to survive and deal with possible failures, and carry their burdens without crushing under them. We must make them understand how important it is to consider such experiences of hardship as useful and positive episodes in their personal development.
We must put special emphasis on developing our students’ sense of empathy; our aim is to make them capable, even in today’s fast-paced world, of bonding with other people, attentively listening to them, and being ready to respond to their problems and needs with an intent to help, if need be.
It is our priority to help our students to develop a sense of honour, integrity, self-awareness and perseverance; we endeavour to teach them how to remain honest, generous and faithful individuals in a world driven by self-interest. We wish to equip them with sacred values that stand the test of time and enable them to make a difference between right and wrong (and its many forms and shades) in real life.
Why Kőrösi?
Kőrösi seems to have been an inexplicable mystery to me. For many of us, Kőrösi is not just the starting point but a place where it is always good to return. As for me, it is my third return. First I was a student here between 1988 and 1993, then I taught here between 2000 and 2003, and now I am the Headmaster of the school. Whenever I enter the building and walk along the corridors, I have a special feeling; it is as if I was coming home.
Why IB?
Perhaps one of the most amazing capacities of humanity and the human mind is creativity. The development of this ability is best fostered by educational systems which are based on individual, project-based learning, are open to social problems and complexity, and can transform theoretical knowledge to practical, real-life situations. I am convinced that the IB Diploma Programme serves this purpose, while it also teaches the students about the fundamental principles and values of our world and society.