Family
Putting Back to School in Perspective
As your children return to school I am once again urging parents to take a healthy perspective on the role of school and grades in the lives of your children and family. While everyone benefits from a sound education and solid basic skills, too many parents ask much more from their children and, correspondingly, too much from themselves.
The reality is that for most children, regardless of their socioeconomic status, school seems to have minimal relevance to their current lives and makes demands that are typically developmentally inappropriate or not responsive to changes in society. How often have children asked you why they need to learn one or more of their school subjects and your reply is that it will help them get into a good college or get a better job? What does that mean to your typical 8 or 12 or even 16 year old? Some children will be successful because they are eager to please you and their teachers and will work hard. Others will be very successful simply because they are very bright and exceptional grades come easy. And some, as they get older, will become driven by a desire to get into a very outstanding college, whether or not it is actually important to how their lives turn out.
But, for too many children and families, school becomes a consuming struggle filled with a level of stress that is unhealthy for all concerned and often a source of much family conflict. At a time in our society when everyone’s lives seemed overloaded with choices and demands, school has come to consume too much of our limited family and personal time. Interviews with children repeatedly result in feedback of a desire for more down time and more time with parents. Childhood requires a significant amount of playtime for that is how children explore their worlds and manage the emotions swirling inside. At a time when our world is truly threatening, not just from a scary movie but right off the nightly news, children especially need more time with parents to feel secure and more play time to work through their anxieties or to get some relief from them. If that time is spent fighting about homework or receiving extra tutoring just to boost grades or SAT scores, no one really benefits. Even more important, it is harmful to the health of the family and, especially, the children.
As I have stated in many previous articles, grades are not predictive of career or personal success. Neither is the rating of the college your child attends. Life is too complex for something so singular and simple to be central in determining outcomes. MANY factors contribute, from the quality of parent-child relationships to the quality of peer relationships, from temperament to such concepts as self-worth and resilience. Some children have traumatic and/or deprived childhoods and very successful adult lives. Typically they will point to one or more close attachments to an adult while growing up as the key factor that enabled them to turn out so well. Others seem to have it all, yet their lives become tragic disappointments. Often we cannot even explain why.
Given the complexity of life and the fact that your children are really only living with you in their growing-up years for less than a one-quarter of their expected lifespan– in fact, for newborns it is probably only one-fifth of their expected lifespan– doesn’t it make more sense to find a better balance between the role of school and a broader education about life and relationships? Doesn’t it make more sense to use more of your time to enjoy your children instead of battling over homework or arguing about passing grades that you think should be higher?
So much has been written about the concept of multiple intelligences. School, unfortunately, taps primarily an academic form of intelligence and very little of others such as creativity, social, emotional, visual-spatial, musical, or athletic, to name a few. Have you ever thought about the fact that public education is probably the only component of our society that has remained essentially unchanged since the turn of the Nineteenth Century!
When education became available to the larger masses, it did so based on a model that is best described as fragmented education. Children were divided by age groups, regardless of readiness. The school day was divided into short time periods regardless of the appropriateness by age or subject matter. Children were assigned to study several totally independent subjects each day despite the inefficiency of trying to remember large amounts of disconnected information. Finally there is a continued emphasis on factual knowledge despite the limited usefulness of recalling facts in everyday life tasks including careers.
Why has education ignored all the new knowledge about how children learn or the exciting technology revolution or the changes in society, especially family and ethnic diversity? Yes there are shining examples of schools or even districts that have not stayed the same. A very exciting program called New American Schools (www.nas.org ) began funding new models for public education back in 1992 and has established an incredible record of multiple, successful approaches to educating our children. But they point out that to really make a difference it requires a top down approach to achieve a broader change to how we teach our children. The enormous political and bureaucratic barriers to such change convince me we won’t see this in our lifetime.
But I urge parents to work at this from the ground up. Start by reading a book, Bold Plans for School Restructuring (Stringfield, et. Al., Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 1996). Will you get as excited as I did about the seemingly simple yet challenging change to a system that educates by focusing on multi-disciplinary projects with flexible schedules and allowing all children to contribute in a meaningful way to the outcome? “The real test of learning is not in what we know but in what we accomplish with what we know.” (p.27) Learning, from day one, should be about the application of knowledge to achieve personal and group objectives, to have a meaningful impact on the community in which we live and work. Does that sound at all like what your children are doing now?
In what one project refers to as “Purpose-Centered Learning”, there are many examples at all grade levels of children doing projects that they choose from the world around them, work that is meaningful, work that often is not just helpful to the students but often contributes to family and community. It requires teachers to change roles from subject-specialists to multi-dimensional advisors, encouraging children to become decision makers and active participants in their own education. It encourages children to use many resources and modalities for learning.
“Purpose-Centered Learning” can produce a health fair; It can lead to an understanding of the ecology or topography of the town and how that compares to other communities around the world; It can answer that bewildering question, “How does a restaurant know how much of which kinds of food to have?”; It can lead to improved emergency hospital services in a town or more services to the elderly or a better understanding of how smoking and drinking actually effects our bodies or why people die from cancer. It can learn history through one’s family or one’s town. It can study pond life and water supply. It did lead a group of children to create a bike repair shop in a poor neighborhood where most broken bikes couldn’t afford to be fixed.
If you read this book and others like it, not only might some of you become
more committed to changing the way your town educates your children, but I hope
it also helps you to put the current education your children are getting in
a better perspective. If you are able to recognize the old-fashioned, inherent
limitations of the way schools teach our children, then perhaps it will make
it easier for you to recognize there are better ways to relate to your children
over the next nine months than by overemphasizing their academic achievements.
Investing more of your precious time in playing and talking about the rest of
the world that you share should at least be equally valued, if not more so.
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