My son is currently preoccupied with marching bands. Specifically tubas. He’s 2. When he asked me the other day for a white tuba, I politely told him I didn’t think we had one around the house, and perhaps he could think about how to make one.
He disappeared to his room, retrieved an old gray vacuum tube, and started walking around the house with it pretending to play it as a tuba. Then he took his baby sister’s Fisher Price walker and put it over his shoulders and played that for a while. He then settled on a tuba made from large Lego bricks, which he has been playing morning, noon, and night for the past two days. He hadn’t been very good at building with the Legos until he got the idea to make the tuba. His skill level quickly went from zero to hero in the matter of a few hours.
The point is, he was obsessed. And that’s an important thing we can learn from children.
At some point we learn to get bored with things. I’m not quite sure when that transformation takes place, but I have a feeling it comes around those tween years. I remember saying “I’m bored” a lot around the ages of 9-12. I think that corresponds to the age when most of us have spent enough time in school to figure out the rest of our lives are going to be spent abiding by rules, reaching benchmarks (or feeling bad about our failures), and minding the clock. I was “good” at school. That is to say, I was good at completing my homework, good at taking tests, good at behaving well in the classroom. As for the content that I took away from all those years of school, I’m not sure much persisted beyond how to “be good”. Sure, I remember my multiplication tables, but there are many other hours of my life that I spent being filled with information that I didn’t care enough about to remember today.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how we educate our kids. Naturally, having two myself I’m interested in the subject. I’ve been talking with parent friends lately about preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school. We’re all comparing notes about what the best path for our kids might be. We’re sussing out school reputations. Some are concerned about the lack of math and science strength in schools, others are concerned about the lack of arts and music. And in general, everyone is concerned about the reality that they will probably have to send their kids to public school.
For the most part these parents attended public schools themselves, and believe in public education. They aren’t necessarily wealthy people. These are friends that work as baristas and public high school teachers, grad researchers and designers. Household incomes probably range from $30K-100K. It’s safe to say most of us can’t afford $5-15K of private school tuition annually, let alone double for two or more children. But they are involved people. They have the capacity, through their interest and care, to make a major difference in multiple kids’ lives, not only their own, because they will put the energy into making sure their kids get a great education wherever they end up going to school.
Why are we afraid to send our kids to public school? How can we change that? If all these families do manage to figure out ways to send their kids to private school, the parental brain drain and missing involvement on PTAs and other school committees will make their neighborhood schools that much weaker.
It’s not just the lack of certain programs that make these parents nervous, it’s the way children are taught. To the test. By the clock. In a room with 30 other kids. Oregon high schools graduate fewer than 70% of their students. Oregon has the highest rates of unemployment and food assistance in the nation. Perhaps these things are connected.
How might we create public schools that we can be proud to send our kids to?
Let’s come back to my obsessive toddler. Kids have skills – important ones – that we adults have forgotten, or learned to forget. They have a focus, a clarity of purpose, that we find hard to achieve. They have the ability to stick with something until they master it, because they choose their tasks and are unequivocally interested in them. Some alternative educational systems, like Waldorf, endeavor to create learning environments where children are valued as contributors and leaders of their own education and are not simply empty vessels to be filled and then tested. These are mostly private institutions where the price of admission ensures parental involvement.
In a rapidly changing global economy, the definition of “skills” seems to be at the forefront of the debates about education. Certainly we want our kids to have the basic math, science, and language skills needed to take part in today’s world. But how to we prepare them to be prepared for anything? Looking back at the past 20 years things have changed so rapidly, do we expect that to change? How can we prepare them to be creative problem-solvers, stewards of our environment, imaginative entrepreneurs?
What are some examples of schools you’ve found that are doing a great job of preparing students to learn outside the traditional system (public or private)? Here are a few I’ve become aware of in my research:
Southwest Charter School, Portland – hands-on learning
Vittra Schools, Sweden – open learning environments
Urban Montessori Charter School, Oakland – design thinking
Sojourner School, Milwaukie – multiple intelligences
