On a blustery, wet Friday in February, Y11 Eleanor boarded a southward train with Lucy from Year 10 and Mr Phipps. They were bound for Portsmouth High School, where Eleanor –having won the regional semi-final at Howell’s School in Cardiff – was to compete in the final of the Chrystall Carter Public-Speaking Competition.
The competition in which Eleanor was competing is named after Chrystall Carter, a former General Secretary of the GDST and a woman whose irrepressible energy, love of the Trust and belief in the power of reasoned debate led her husband to establish the competition in her memory in 2001. In the competition, students are given a topic to speak on relating to topical issues of the day, and must be prepared to take challenging questions from the audience following their speeches.
Joining the audience of students, teachers and parents at the final were Cheryl Giovannoni, CEO of the GDST, and two distinguished Portsmouth High alumnae: Anjana Gadgil, a presenter on BBC South Today, and best-selling author, Lucy Foley. Following a warm and witty speech from the Headteacher of Portsmouth High, Jane Prescott, the judges took to their seats and the speeches began.
Over the course of the next hour, we heard five different talks from GDST students from all over the country, on five vastly different topics. These ranged from the assertion that all news is fake to some degree to the need for us to embrace the racial other, the ontological argument for evil and the role of memory in shaping identity.
Eleanor At Chrystall Carter Public-Speaking Competition Final 28.02.2020
Eleanor was last to take the stage, and her topic, ‘Can we tackle climate change without changing human nature first?’, was typically hard-hitting. Packed with references to literature, philosophy and progressive politics, Eleanor analysed the impact of human self-interest on the environment and then evaluated the possibility of translating our self-interest into self-preservation. It was a tour de force argument, ending with a lovely inversion of a line from Kafka. It was Kafka, Eleanor reminded us, who claimed that, ‘There is infinite hope – only not for us.’ But if we can only work with human nature, Eleanor added in a deft qualification of Kafka’s cynical conclusion, then the opposite is also true: There is no hope except for us.
Following a three-minute session of questions from the floor, which Eleanor dealt with admirably, the judges withdrew. When they returned, they announced that they would be presenting two awards: the overall winner was Sarena from Croydon High School, whose speech on embracing the other was an eminently worthy winner for its sophisticated mixture of high concept and humour, its warm self-deprecating wit and its use of audience involvement.
However, the judges also wanted to award a rare, unprecedented second award to another speaker – and this was Eleanor. Cheryl Giovannoni praised Eleanor for her wonderfully dramatic introduction, her use of pacing and phrasing and the sense of urgency with which she impressed on the audience the importance of her topic.
On the train journey home, we discussed the speeches we’d heard that day. If there was one thing uniting them all, we concluded, it was that all of them were shaped by a keen sense of social conscience and a responsibility to engage with the challenges facing this particular historical moment.
These girls – and all the girls of today’s GDST today – seem to be asking the right questions: can we change our behaviour? Is goodness possible? Is it reasonable to hope? On the basis of their seriousness, then perhaps we can.