The Giant Butterbur Flowers
January 21–25, Hunenberg, Switzerland
Seasonal Memoir #52
Every young person has a genius unique and native to them. This determination of character must be discovered, and cannot be prescribed by anyone else. The purpose of schooling is to remove all barriers to a joyful interaction with life itself, to let this natural force have free play, and to exhibit a particular contribution to society. Rather than drill knowledge into the child, the school should draw out the genius within and cultivate it for its own sake as well as for the common good.
I paraphrased the preceding statement from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early treatise on education during his brief time on the Boston and then Concord school boards, as presented by historian Robert Gross in his new book The Trancendentalists and Their World. It grabbed my attention as a simple and elegant way to describe the purpose of education. Most striking to me, however, is the fact that we are still struggling to break free from drill-and-kill and lecture-based approaches nearly two hundred years after Emerson laid down this idea.
And barriers still abound, among them, and in no particular order:
- A business model that fails to provide access to quality education for all
- Teacher-centered instruction (rather than student-centered)
- A lack of courage (institutional and individual)
- Data-poor environments (lack of understanding of what is working)
- Equity and inclusion deficits
- One’s well being and mental health
- Ineffective or inconsistent governance and leadership
- A lack of a guaranteed and viable curriculum
- Structures and systems overly concerned with ensuring order and compliance
- Mental models stuck in what may have worked in the past but no longer delivers fruit in the present
- Politics
- A lack of autonomy and self-efficacy
- A lack of relevance and meaning
- A deficit of rigor and challenge (tyranny of low expectations)
- A transactional culture between school and families (rather than true community)
- Ethical deficiencies
The longtime head of school I’ll succeed in India is a friend and mentor. Among many things, he’s known for canvassing a wide swath of international school leadership on ideas, trends, and queries. His latest outreach surveyed a few of us on the following prompt: If you were going to consider or implement 2–3 “things” to redesign the “Business Model” of schools, like ours, what would they be? (Examples: Shared virtual student cohorts from around the globe; sharing teachers among a cohort of schools; HS in 3 years or 5 years; single courses or a set of courses that students (who are not full time) could take; semester-long full-time internships for students; etc.)
Here’s what came back from a couple of heads of school:
- “A curriculum better than the IB (International Baccalaureate) — based on all that is good about the IB, but minus all the testing and steeped in local resources, field trips, experiential learning.”
- “This is highly iterative work. My contrarian counsel: stop looking for the silver bullet(s). Don’t blow up the contemporary progressive model. Build structures and processes that move us all toward and forward to nurturing each individual as a member of our interdependent collective.”
- “[I] like all these ideas. Because we are currently doing so much exploratory work around it; there would be a focus around being global advocates with energy around service, understanding world dynamic/politics, being able to engage in thoughtful and respectful conversation. Agree about more individual relevancy for individual students.”
Here was my impromptu response: “Love it. Including vocational training, but not woodshop or small gas engines (but that would be cool), but instead machine learning, big data, and other emerging fields. Flip the mission, so the schools are meeting the missions of each of its individual students, with some of this “schooling” happening on campus, and some at home online, and some in the field, etc.”
As I prepare for what I hope is my last gig as an international school leader, and while I continue to draw inspiration from my colleagues, I have been searching for a unifying idea to drive my efforts. With R.W. Emerson providing the start, I look to revise, refine, and ratify my own mission to make a difference in India and beyond.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver
