In a learning community with more than 2,000 members, a mission and vision that brings everyone’s goals together, and establishes were should every individual be looking towards the future, is a necessity. The Columbus School, as a community that values diversity, embraces a culture of collaboration, excellence, and inspires outstanding student leaders, has published a mission and a vision that has publicly prevailed over the last six years. Over every circumstance in which a decison needs to be made, the school should strictly adhere to this mission. The importance of this statements has lost strength over the last years. While the mission at The Columbus School “is to contribute to the education of ethical and competent citizens of the world,” the vision focuses on a reputation based goal of being recognized as “one of the leading international education institutions in Colombia.” Trying so hard to gain this recognition, the vision of the school has made the mission lose its path.

When someone tries to reach fame and doesn’t control the temptation of being recognized, he loses his essence and forgets where he was when it all started. This is exactly what’s happening to The Columbus School. “Our main goal as educators, is to contribute to the positive formation of students, with transparency, honesty, and clarity,” stated Maria Victoria Jaramillo, TCS’ High School’s Vice Principal. This message has not being transmitted to students throughout educators’ actions. “When I started school, I saw that the school had very clear goals on how to create outstanding individuals and leaders. I really thought it was their goal and they were actually working for it,” explained TCS Junior, Tatiana Botero.” Over the last years, the school main goal has shifted into being recognized as a school who creates outstanding individuals.” An unconformity started to grow-up on present students do to a feeling about the TCS’ lack of interest in their personal life’s.

There is no doubt at all that TCS is actually interested in creating outstanding leaders, but there is a great difference on “working for creating global citizens that make a change in the world or wanting to be recognized as the best school for creating leaders,” according to Botero. “The School already sees that we are influential people in society, due to our families or social bubble. They are not working to make our values or our opportunities grow, as they just assume we are going to do it.” One of the biggest uncertainties that grow up on students do to TCS’ mission, is that the school’s supposes it to happen automatically just because directives believe in the self-development of students.

“The school’s intention is to follow this mission, but it sometimes gets jeopardized when we don’t have follow-through on certain behaviors,” clarified Emily Butterworth, TCS’ 9th, and 11th grade English teacher. As students, we have been always been protected by our parents, and we have a big area of protection inside the school’s regulations, which makes it really difficult for students to get expelled. As teachers have expressed, this lack of follow-through over the students that break the codes of ethics takes away some credibility over the importance the school gives to their mission and vision.

Certainly, the school’s intentions are true, their goal is “ to contribute to the education of ethical and competent citizens of the world,” as stated in their mission. But beyond a doubt, we need to realize that their vision, which has relly in such an ambitious goal of being in “2020 one of the leading international education institutions in Colombia,” has sometimes made TCS community forget about the importance of self-supperation, self-development, and global compromise. The temptation of fame needs to be avoided by TCS and instead, they should do the quiet work that leads to true success. “My life philosophy is that in every situation that I face, I will always be thinking what is the best for the students’ education and their lives,” explained Jaramillo. As part of this quality learning community, I hope that this life philosophy always rules over the minds of contributors to student’s education, and never gets contaminated by the ambition of fame.