Chris Anderson '74, distinguished alumnus

During a special assembly in Parker Hall, on October 28, Woodstock School recognised its distinguished alumnus Chris Anderson '74, who is an eminent publisher, technology guru and curator of the TED Conferences (TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design). Anderson is a dedicated promoter of global citizenship, whose work helps spread innovative ideas around the world. He addressed the students on how the eight years he spent at Woodstock gave him a global perspective from a young age.

Speaking about himself as an 8th grader sitting in Parker Hall, he said: ". If you could have somehow zoomed a camera right inside the head of that 8th grader you'd have seen something strange. You'd see that something had happened inside his brain, something that was directly attributable to his experience of being at Woodstock and that would profoundly shape his future. And I'm not talking about Math or Social Studies. I'm talking about something that hardly any of the world's children get to experience.. Without even thinking about it, we learned that superficial differences of race, nationality, colour really don't matter that much. We're all just people. We all laugh, we all cry, we all love, we all bleed."

"When my life in England started feeling too small and I felt America calling... that was Woodstock. When I took over the TED conference and decided the content was so good it had to be shared freely with the world. That was Woodstock. And when just this year we started giving permission to anyone in the world to organize their own TED event (in year one 40,000 people in 50 countries have been to a local TED event)... that was Woodstock."

"The world is getting ever more inter-connected. Telecommunication in the 21st century doesn't know any borders. Neither does trade. Neither does terrorism. Neither does climate change. It's becoming ever more obvious that all of our main problems ... and also all of our opportunities can only be tackled by people taking a global perspective. People like you."