As teachers in
Leondeio Lyceum in Nea Smyrni, we have undertaken the responsibility
to educate the children that parents trust us with, so that they become
mature human beings with a complete personality. Who is the “complete
person” for us? It’s not just the successful businessman
or the proper family-man but a lot more.
We are living in a time of continuous change and increasing technological development.
The crisis of ethical values and fundamental principles that govern modern
world is more than obvious. Everyday we realize more and more children’s
need not only to read and write properly, but mostly to develop into a complete
and powerful personality, capable of corresponding to the needs of our era.
Our primary concern is the children’s anguish to learn to co-exist, adjust
and co-operate and even put up with the “others”, the “different” ones.
We believe it is essential to make them capable of truly loving and struggling
to achieve perfection through their moral and mental formation.
In our effort to offer a complete educational framework we have already included several solidarity activities in our annual school curriculum:
1. Lotteries are organized in both our primary schools “St. Dionysus” and “Chrysostomos Smyrnis” twice a year. The money collected is given to charitable institutions (homeless lodgings, orphanages, institutions for children with special needs, homes for the aged, refugee organizations….)
2. Throughout the school year, primary school pupils collect their offers in a money box. The money is then given to poor families and charitable institutions. Furthermore, from time to time, food, clothes and stationery are collected and given to orphanages and refugee organizations.
3. Once a year, some of the 4th to 6th year students, accompanied by their teachers, visit places where food is given to refugees, in order for the children to offer the meal themselves.
4. Our primary school pupils organize a school festival for children of the same age who live abandoned in institutions, with their teacher’s help, once a year.
5. All students help the religious missions of both the Orthodox and the Catholic churches on several occasions.
6. Junior High School (Gymnasium) students have undertaken the education of twelve children in Tongo – Africa by sending the necessary sums of money for their school expenses to the qualified European organization every year.
7. Senior High School students have financially undertaken meal offerings to the homeless of a parish in N. Smyrni.
8. In exceptional circumstances contributions are organized: students and teachers offer material and ethical support to refugees, victims of earthquakes, floods etc.
9. Finally, since 1998, we have established an activity called “Love Sortie”. One morning at the end of January on the 3 Hierarchs celebration all High School students, separated into groups according to class or year, visit an institution (school for children with special needs, orphanages, homes for the aged, asylums for the incurable…). The aim of this sortie is not just charity and money offerings as support for the goals of the particular institution. Our aim is for the children to get in touch with the other side of life, not to feel pity, but to get to know the wealth and power of all these suffering people’s souls, the same people that society often casts aside.
Through
similar solidarity actions and our own personal experiences and examples,
we are trying to help our children feel the value of giving without
expecting anything in return, the simple joy of standing by others offering
their smile and believing that through this smile they have the power
to make somebody happy. We’re trying to make children look beyond
themselves, look at the others, the different ones and appreciate the
inner wealth that those people have to offer by seeing the face of Jesus
Christ in them. Let’s not forget that our thoughts are always
governed by St. Marcellin’s words:
“ All their lives will be an echo of the things
that you will have taught them”.
