Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life

by Diane Tavenner

students were prepared for factory life. The same subjects were taught the same way and for the same amount of time. Textbooks, a newer invention, were used to standardize knowledge. Bells, inspired by factory life, were meant to keep everyone on schedule, industrial lockers housed all that was personal, tests were given one time and one time only to sort and rank students. Yes, it looked like an assembly line, but most people were graduating to take just that type

The trade-offs were obvious. Conformity trumped individuality. The high-performers and the low-performers on the discrete skills valued in this system didn’t get what they needed from high school, because it wasn’t really designed for them, but rather for the “majority” in the middle.

The parents’ role in all of this was to ensure their child’s compliance: go to school, sit...

But according to Forbes, the employees of 2020 need: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence.

we forget that when an individual is self-sustaining and fulfilled, they don’t need a lot of assistance.

Lectures are replaced with deep discussion, planning, research, model making, writing, and lots of critical thinking as student and teacher work side by side.

Students who are struggling are also more engaged by project-based learning, making it a promising strategy for all students, not just those who are already thriving.

Even if they acknowledge their school experience was substandard in some way, they believe “it built character.” That may be true. But if we can piece apart the nostalgia around football games and the bonding experience of commiserating with classmates about boredom in math class, what is there? It’s difficult, if you’re generally happy with your life, to think, “What if my education had been better?” Would that have been a bad thing? If you got to where you are now faster, or with less boredom and busywork and more time for exploration, interests, and relationships, what else might you have been able to accomplish? Knowingly or not, it is our unwillingness to honestly engage with these questions that often blocks change.

Getting too involved, by taking over, is a mistake I see parents making constantly, and from personal experience, I get why.

The hard part is the work we need to do with ourselves to productively let go and trust the structured process of growth.

Each of us could be successful and we could help one another succeed as well.

By definition, Summit couldn’t be a school where there were winners and losers.

We also learned quickly that no one wanted to make all of the decisions, but everyone wanted to know who would decide, how decisions were made, and what role they played in them.

why would we assume everyone would use the exact same process?

the object is to learn how to learn by following his curiosity,

“just because” doesn’t do much other than provoke the natural human instinct to press against something that doesn’t make sense to you.

For some reason we don’t think twice about having to say the word “mom” five hundred times before our child says it back to us, but when our kids get to high school we think we can teach something once and they should get it.