THE Redlands came of age as a leading education hub on Friday when Sheldon College opened its new Learning and Innovation for a New Queensland (LINQ) precinct.
The $15 million education centre is a national first and sets a stunningly high benchmark for education, launching this city to the front in the stakes as a leading learning domain.
The Sheldon centre was officially opened by the Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove who had travelled to the Redlands with his wife Lady Lynne Cosgrove specifically to perform the ceremony.
The LINQ precinct is built over two storeys with robotics, engineering and computer-aided design laboratories and a fully-functional workshop plus lecture theatre, an industry-standard film and television studio and accompanying editing suites, enabling students to progress a project from original design concept to production, marketing and dispatch.
It is a unique and cutting edge concept that Sir Peter described as "one of the most outstanding educational facilities in the nation".
These facilities are important to the learning direction education is taking to equip students with the skills of a rapidly and vastly changing world.
The innovations presented at the LINQ centre are a tribute to the foresight and determination of the college's founder and principal Dr Lyn Bishop who reminded those attending the opening that the advent of the 21st century had presented a "real challenge for schools to remain relevant to students today in the midst of the technological revolution that we're all experiencing while we see our world become increasingly diverse, globalised, complex and media saturated".
"Education in the future will not be an extrapolation of the way we did things in the past, because our children today stand at the frontier of a new society," Dr Bishop said.
It is this new society one that Dr Bishop said was "dominated by globalisation, information technologies, a marked empahsis on knowledge capital and market-driven forces" that the LINQ precinct aims to prepare students for.
While praise is due to Sheldon in its current moment of triumph, this city is also a co-partner in the accolades as education has become one of our leading industries.
Private and state schools are setting an agenda in education that has become the envy of many and has taken the Redlands into the realms of a sought-after centre of learning.
Our schools are being sought out by parents and families not only in this city, but across the state, the nation and even overseas.
It is these learning environments, like the one created at Sheldon College, that has become the drawcard.
Education has become such a vital cog in the Redlands that it should be more widely recognised; so much to the point where serious thought and action needs to be on the table for tertiary facilities, where students who experience these wonderful innovations like the LINQ precinct, can continue their learning, with the capaibility of attaining distinctions, locally.
