As family members outside of school and as learners by day in our schools?
While this article from the Washington Post focuses on parenting, I couldn’t help but think about how we over-control kids in school—robbing them of valuable agency they’ll need when they leave us.
Take it from this spy mom: Our kids are capable of more by Christina Hilsberg
Confession: I’ve never been a parent. But after decades in education (as a music educator), I feel that….we have an incomplete picture of what our kids are capable of…. And the system isn’t set up to support us necessarily in finding that out.
And, it’s gotten worse over time, too.
I remember during the first half of my career giving high school kids free time to explore (in pairs or more with no adult) big cities such as New York, Paris, London and Florence.
Never any issues….and they appreciated the trust and freedom to grow, learn and experience independence.
A highlight of the day was always hearing about what they learned and experienced as we caught up over a tasty evening meal.
I also remember a group of passionate theatre kids that wanted to organize their own musicals…from top to bottom…
Securing the rights, the musicians, raising funds, directing, designing, selling tickets, tear down…the whole spectrum of the art….
Amazing work came about as a result….
My role? Co-designing the opportunity with them, and letting them take the reins and develop the skills that I’m sure have served them well into adulthood… (Now that they are approaching their 40s!)
After moving into administration, I rarely if ever saw this kind of “letting go.” In fact the opposite…more constraining…more controlling…
So yeh….
At least in schools, I do believe we control our learners way too much…to the point of stifling curiosities and creativity.
It’s not our fault, though….increasing focus on compliance and standardization in schools and fear of the unknown/failure/harm outside of schools…. That’s all become a perfect storm that is just not serving us or our kids well.
Two resources to wrap this up:
- Gever Tulley’s TED talk: 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do Basically…let your kids play with power tools!
- And his San Francisco School… BrightWorks.
Do you have any experiences where you had one of those “aha” moments…a kid showed you they were much more capable than the world gave them credit for?
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