This article originally appeared in the winter 2014 Harker Quarterly.
by Chris Nikoloff, Head of School My son’s basketball team had its first tournament of the season recently. It was my son’s first basketball tournament in his life. The tournament was an opportunity for the team to experience the dual nature of competition: each contest can teach us about our opponents and ourselves. Sun Tzu, in “The Art of War,” says, “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”
At the end of the day, our primary competition ought to be against our own potential, not others. We compete and compare with others all the time, but hopefully only to understand our own potential more clearly. Aristotle said that man is by nature a political animal. We learn about ourselves when we compete and compare, but our competition with others ought to be secondary. Making the comparing and competing with others our primary focus can throw us off track.
A parent recently referred me to William Deresiewicz’s book “Excellent Sheep,” in which the author talks about how students in elite colleges lose themselves to conformity of thought, majors and career paths. A review in The New York Times captures his proposition: “We’ve spawned a generation of polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities.” I don’t think this is entirely fair, but a herd mentality, striving toward a limited definition of success, breeds unhealthy competition and an uninteresting conformity that Deresiewicz laments.
As the nation’s high school seniors are in the thick of early admissions season for college, the parent’s book recommendation is timely. It used to be that a few go-getters applied early to college. Now the majority of ambitious students apply early and often. Competition and comparing are rampant. Deresiewicz caused a stir with his article in The New Republic, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” and its subtitle, “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.” Apparently no one is listening to his advice.
Deresiewicz is not without his critics, but I believe his message can help us pay more attention to the second half of Sun Tzu’s advice, “know yourself.” Too often, comparing to others can lead to following others, as Deresiewicz warns. The parent’s son who referred me to Deresiewicz’s book followed his own path in high school, didn’t necessarily load up on APs, and is currently studying something he is deeply passionate about at an Ivy League college.
That is the irony: parents compare their kids to others hoping for any hint of advantage toward getting into top colleges, but those same colleges are actually looking for hints of authenticity in the students they admit. They want interesting learning communities and students who “think outside the box.” As Deresiewicz learned during his stint in admissions, colleges are looking for students with PQs (personal qualities) or who are deeply “pointy” if not well-rounded.
My son’s basketball team learned in competition that they need to switch between man-to-man and zone defense more effectively, and that they need more plays that they can execute. Perhaps they learned more; I don’t understand basketball well enough to say. They could only learn this in competition.
But after the competition they have to return to their practices and face themselves to see if they can reach their potential. Plato famously said, “Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” That battle with ourselves, our potential, has to be fought alone, and in that battle our true identity is forged, our true path found, after which comparing should mean very little anyway.
This story originally appeared in the spring 2014 Harker Quarterly.
On the parenting circuit these days there is much talk about resilience, grit and how these two characteristics contribute to success. Angela Lee Duckworth, an education researcher who studies non-IQ based competencies, has a popular TED talk on perseverance and grit. In Amy Chua’s new book, “The Triple Package,” she and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, argue that impulse control is one of three traits that contribute to success. Paul Tough talks about grit in his acclaimed “How Children Succeed.” It seems that parents and education researchers cannot get enough of “true grit.”
But how do we teach such things as grit and perseverance? In educational research we periodically discover the secret to success and then try to figure out how to teach it. We pretend the secret to success is teachable and we react to its discovery as if we found plutonium. Can we teach grit? It is not unlike asking whether or not we can teach creativity, entrepreneurialism or thinking skills. And how new an insight is this? Would our grandparents be surprised by the notion that grit and perseverance contribute to success?
April is Ogre Awards month at Harker, when the second grade celebrates stories from around the world. Many of the ancient stories – myths, folk and fairy tales – instruct in grit and perseverance, though they never use these terms. In these stories, heroes figuratively transform their greatest weakness into their greatest strength; their fear into courage; their spiritual poverty into soulful gold. These transformations are demonstrated, not discussed, and they communicate straight to a child’s psyche, bypassing his brain. In this regard they are the opposite of algebra.
In many of the stories by the Brothers Grimm and others, for instance, a hero faces the darker elements of nature, himself or experiences a humbling ordeal. Cinderella famously spends her days sweeping the hearth; the king’s son in Iron Hans apprentices himself to the gardener; Hansel and Gretel are taken to the witch’s home; Jonah is swallowed by a whale; Odysseus travels to the underworld.
These structures persist in contemporary storytelling too. Luke Skywalker flies into the center of the Death Star. In “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” Flint Lockwood, the movie’s hero, journeys to the center of a giant meatball to thwart food hurricanes. There is something in the structure of these stories that resonates with the structure of our psyches. When children tap into grit or persevere through difficulty, they are experiencing their own ordeal through which transformation happens.
There are parts of life that no amount of “helicopter parenting,” “snowplow parenting” or even “tiger mothering” can immune our children from, however well-intentioned. I think we sometimes fruitlessly try to bring our children all light and no darkness, but that is not how existence works. My father-in-law always says that we cannot walk in our children’s shoes – they will find their own way. On the search for the Holy Grail, Percival, one of King Arthur’s knights, must enter the woods where there is no path.
The newly found awareness of grit and perseverance is probably good for parenting, education and kids, though like many other fads, I hope parents and educators do not take it too far. I can see courses and assemblies on grit. Better to have kids discover their grit naturally and intrinsically. Lao Tzu said, “Mastering others is power. Mastering yourself is true strength.” It is the hope of education that each child, through grit and perseverance, finds true strength and takes the journey of a lifetime – her own.
This article originally appeared in the spring 2013 Harker Quarterly.
What if children are more whole, complete human beings than adults? What do I mean by whole? Less fragmented. Well, that won’t do for a definition. No self-respecting teacher would allow a student to define a word simply by invoking its antonym and saying, not that.
But how are children whole in a way that adults are not, and how do we do them a disservice by treating them, as Alan Watts points out, as “human beings on probation”? Wordsworth said, “The child is Father of the Man,” capital F, capital M. What did he mean?
There are times when as a parent I feel like my children are human beings on probation. When one of my sons wants the super-size orange Fanta instead of the small, I ask my- self, doesn’t he know better? Aren’t I compromising enough by even allowing Fanta? Western civilization depends upon children drinking water, and he wants a cup of Fanta that is bigger than his whole head?
That is when parenting becomes a duty: when we are protecting civilization from the whimsical, wayward tendencies of children; when we are chiseling away at those tendencies so that children become “productive members of society”; when we demand quiet around the house so we do not lose our minds.
Alfie Kohn, in his book “Unconditional Parenting,” discusses a few hidden beliefs behind what he calls conditional parenting, the kind that makes parental love and attention conditional upon certain behaviors and attitudes we expect from our children. One of the hidden beliefs is B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism, which reduces children to a set of behaviors, good and bad, versus a whole human being with thoughts, feelings and a complex inner world.
I become a behaviorist in a flash, however, when the boys are fighting over a toy or when one decides to make the other’s life miserable. I go Pavlovian in nanoseconds. But Mr. Kohn’s voice is now in the back of my head. What has led up to the crisis? What is each kid jockeying for? Why such strong attachments to a piece of plastic? Who really instigated what? Do I really have the time and patience to figure all of this out?
Saints admired children for their unconditioned view on reality, their spontaneous relationship to what is, including themselves. That is perhaps what is meant by whole – children have less conditioning through experience. Early toddlers are perfect Zen masters: a tube of toothpaste, a drawer or a wooden spoon are all things of wonder.
But as educators and parents we have to do something, don’t we? If not, some children will watch “The Avengers,” drink Fanta and ponder the miracle of pots and pans all day. We have to prepare them for the demands of civilization. I think this is one of the many insights in Amy Ch-ua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom” (which I believe got some unfair press): children are far more capable than we give them credit for, and per- forming anything at a high level is far more rewarding than stinking.
Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Ouch. That hurts. But perhaps as we prepare children to learn from society, society can and ought to learn from children. Healing means wholeness, and chil- dren can heal with their open, fresh and unprejudiced embrace of life. But children are life, so there is nothing really for them to embrace.
Wordsworth ended that same poem quoted above with, “And I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety.” Children’s days are bound by natural piety, though they don’t know it. Adults’ days often are not, and they know it. Somehow we switch from piety to duty.
We need both. We know the saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Or, as Homer Simpson puts it, “No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy.” I think even kids intuitively understand the balance between piety and duty. Kids like order too, and even gravitate towards it naturally. Why? Because they have it all – they are whole. Adults are too. We just need children to remind us of it sometimes.
This story was originally published in the Spring 2012 issue of Harker Quarterly
While pushing my son on a swing the other day I noticed that he did not know how to swing himself. It is one thing when your son needs help getting on the swing – some are pretty high – but it’s another when he needs you, once he is on the swing, to get going at all. I began talking him through how to swing himself when I noticed another thing: explaining to a child how to swing himself is not easy. What do you say? It is sort of like explaining how to tie your shoes. Where do you begin? To swing, you have to lean back, pull with your arms, project your legs into the air. By the end my son looked like a piece of dough.
I then realized a third thing (it was a day full of epiphanies). I had never been taught how to swing – I had just learned on my own. I am not even sure how or when I learned. I then began thinking about all of the skills I had learned on my own through playing with kids in the neighborhood. Swimming. Throwing and hitting a ball, any kind of ball. Riding a bike, skateboarding, ice skating. Even bowling. And we didn’t just learn these skills, but we internalized the rules of the games as well. We knew enough to argue ferociously about right and wrong.
As I thought about it, my friends and I learned all of these skills organically, without a single lesson, parent or adult to help. If we hadn’t learned these skills we would have been excluded from a load of play and none of us wanted that. My boys, on the other hand, will learn none of these skills without me or some structured program. In other words, they will require the direct intervention of adults to learn these skills. Most of the children I grew up with simply did not take private lessons of any sort. Today, almost all children take some kind of private lesson or are in some structured activity.
I am not judging the present or recalling the good old days of the past. In fact, there was nothing special about our learning these skills ourselves. We learned these skills like we learned how to walk and talk – naturally. There was actually no way we could not learn them. However, my sons most likely will not learn them without my direct intervention. Why the change? What does it mean, if anything, that some children are growing up in a community where learning skills like these will not happen naturally, without direct instruction? If this is a symptom, what is the disease?
After all, learning these kinds of physical skills organically, through neighborhood play, implies a whole set of conditions that support organic learning the way that rich soil supports plant growth. As for conditions, the neighborhood needs mixed age groups among its children so that the older kids pull up the younger ones. There needs to be extended family, like cousins, aunts, uncles. The kids need to have large amounts of unbroken, unsupervised time for play. They need a common set of goals, meaning that most of them have to find playing baseball or riding bikes fun. There needs to be a loose, mutual understanding between parents, almost like unspoken radar. The children need a neighborhood structure that supports them finding each other in these informal, unstructured, but safe environments. They need, well, a neighborhood.
I am not saying that neighborhoods with playing children do not exist today. They even have a name for them – “playborhoods.” There is a website called playborhood.com that is dedicated to promoting free, unstructured play in neighborhoods precisely because it is difficult to find. However, the facts that a website exists to promote free play and that neighborhoods with open play have a special name tell us something. As Kenneth Jackson says in “Crabgrass Frontier,” a history of American suburbs, “There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon.”
What do children learn in unsupervised neighborhood play? They learn socialization, to use a common buzzword today. I am pretty sure my aunts and uncles never used that word. The kids were just doing what they were supposed to do, which was play. They also learn what we now term 21st-century skills, like collaboration, communication and creativity, though none of my friends ever used or even understood those terms. We had to collaborate, communicate and create, otherwise we wouldn’t have any fun.
I did teach my son to pull up and swing himself that day. I still think he prefers to have me push him, but at least he can now swing himself independently. I watch my son among the other kids, followed around by their parents who are instructing, encouraging and preparing them for an uncertain future, arming them with all of the skills they can possibly absorb during their fleeting childhoods. When I see him across the playground, pulling himself up on the swing, flanked by children he doesn’t know, looking across at me smiling with pride, I become a little wistful for the days when children learned these things on their own.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Like so much else in life, there is a paradox at the heart of education and parenting. On the one hand we are supposed to love children for who they are, and on the other hand we are supposed to hold them up to ideals so that they become something other than they are. This is not unlike a related paradox in education: if children, as they learn, understand new knowledge only as it relates to prior knowledge, how can they ever really learn anything new?
To understand a child, says Jiddu Krishnamurti in his “Education and the Significance of Life,” you cannot look at him through “the screen of an ideal.” Krishnamurti means, I believe, that if you see a child through the screen of an ideal you see the ideal but not the child. Also, you and the child will not be in direct relationship. You will be relating to your image or ideal – one of your own projections – not the child himself.
We all hold our children up to ideals. One of the insidious ways we do this is through comparing. What grade did your child get on that assignment? What level is he in? How many APs has he signed up for? How much volunteering has he done lately? “Humility is not comparing,” a former boss used to say to me.
Before becoming a parent, I imagined all sorts of ideals I would hold in front of my children. Then came the reality of a human being. We were out to dinner with a family a few weeks ago and, while waiting for the food to arrive, my oldest son and his friend colored together. His friend colored within the lines a little more precisely than my son did. A lot more precisely. I think his choice of color was more textured too. I couldn’t help comparing. I even considered getting a coloring tutor.
Love children as they are or hold them up to ideals? Both? Are both possible? Parents and educators are anxious about the future. In “That Used to Be Us,” Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum outline four major challenges to the United States that we have been slow to address over the past 20 years. They are globalization, the IT revolution, national and local debt, and energy. All of these pressures and others make parents and educators nervous. Our children will have to “compete,” won’t they?
When I was a child, I remember adults warning us about “the real world” as if the current world we were living in was “unreal.” Now we are fond of saying that children will have to “compete.” I wonder about the idea of educating and raising an army of little competitors. Why? Well, to maintain or increase our standard of living. To buy more toasters. We all want our children to be successful and happy, but defining success has beguiled thinkers from Lao Tzu to Aristotle to Emerson to Deepak Chopra.
So how to resolve the paradoxes at the heart of education and parenting? Paradoxes are, by definition, irresolvable. William Empson said that, “Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that cannot be solved by analysis.” Zeno, an ancient Greek philosopher, discovered a paradox that should keep us from walking out the door. He said that we can never get from point A to point B because there will always be a new midpoint between us and our destination that we first have to cross.
However, we do manage to get out the door every day, and children manage to grow into wonderful young men and women despite educational paradoxes, comparisons and ideals. My son didn’t color as well as his friend, but he did play out a terrible thunderstorm with his crayons. Just like flowers reaching for the sun and yet remaining firmly planted where they are, children find their way, and that is an ideal in itself.
This article originally appeared in the spring 2010 Harker Quarterly.
The author Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1994 commencement address at Syracuse University, offered the following insight: “I first declare to you that the most wonderful thing, the most valuable thing you can get from an education is this – the memory of one person who could really teach, whose lessons made life and yourselves much more interesting and full of possibilities than you had previously supposed possible.” I suppose that when schools cite “love of learning” in their mission statements, as most do, this is the spirit they are after.
Albert Einstein famously said that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Aside from inadvertently giving courage to those who do not believe that children need to learn facts anymore, what the man who imagined riding elevators in space was trying to say, I believe, was that information alone, divorced from imagination, does not constitute a complete education. Einstein was warning against a narrow pursuit of facts without context, knowledge without synthesis, learning without understanding. Mark Twain had a quip with a similar gist: “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”
Today’s parents and students are understandably anxious about the future. If anxiety is caused by, among other factors, a low level of predictability, then families today suffer from predictability deficiency. The decline in civic life, the shrinking of the extended family, the onslaught of media and technology, the intensifying of world competition, the Great Recession – over the past decades these factors, among others, have eroded predictability in what sometimes seems a wild, uncaring world.
Parents often react to this uncertainty by attempting to manufacture certainty. They become “agents” for their children. As agents, parents guide their children through a raft of résumé-building exercises from violin practice to building schools in developing countries, all to help differentiate their precious little ones in the weary eyes of a college admissions reader. As a parent, I also find myself seduced by this “agent frenzy.” Do my children know their colors? Shouldn’t I have initiated piano lessons by now? Are we really veering into a Saturday afternoon without a planned activity? Won’t the kids be, well, bored?
Some of this cultivation is good. I know I could have used a swift kick in the curriculum vitae by my parents when I was in school. But there is a growing backlash against these trends, including counter movements that carry titles such as “free-range parenting” or “slow parenting.” Tom Hodgkinson, author of “The Idle Parent,” reminds us of D. H. Lawrence’s advice on childrearing: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone.”
However, when educators tell parents to relax, everything will work out fine, they ought to feel a twinge of hypocrisy, given that children today, it appears, face an uncertain, competitive future, with far fewer common assumptions about that future. Parents either do not listen to or do not believe the rising tide of advice against the agent approach. And who can blame them? It takes a brave parent to climb down from the nuclear arms race of résumé-building.
Colleges now give warning about two types of students who show up as freshmen on their campuses, “teacups” and “crispies.” Crispies are burned out from an uninspiring, connect-the-dots approach to education. Teacups never really faced disappointment in their careers; hence they shatter, like a teacup, when they receive their first setbacks. These profiles result, I believe, from an unhealthy focus on outcomes over process, grades over learning, activities over passion. Victor Frankl, author of “Man’s Search for Meaning,” said it best: “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” I love that. Success must ensue.
What Einstein called imagination, what Twain feared missing in school, what made life for Vonnegut more full of possibilities than he had previously imagined, what schools call love of learning – this will sustain a young person and carry him or her to success. In “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell lists the colleges the last 25 winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine and chemistry attended – many you have heard of, and many you have not. My favorite is Berea College. Ever heard of it? Berea College has a Nobel Prize winner. In fact, if you look at its Web site, you will see that the school boasts other accomplishments of its alumni too, like the invention of the touch screen.
It is fine and probably advisable to prepare our youngsters for the “Brave New World” they will face. We sense, like no other time in recent history, that we are buffeted by the unknown forces of what Andy Grove of Intel described as a ”strategic inflection point,” or many such points. A parent recently asked me what subject his child ought to learn to be prepared for future. I thought about his question for only a few seconds. All of them, I replied. I suppose I meant that since none of us can predict the future, a thorough grounding in traditional education, fueled by love of learning, is still the best preparation for success in an uncertain world.
In “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” Daniel Pink outlines three ingredients of motivation: mastery, autonomy and purpose. We rush to give our children mastery over something: calculus, violin, golf, soccer. But we fail to teach them to master themselves. In the end, Pinocchio is transformed into a real boy only by a fairy’s magic and his long journey, one he undergoes alone. A little magic, a journey and a promise to be good are what make Pinocchio (and all of us) human.
Oscar Wilde said, “The moment you think you understand a great work of art it’s dead for you.” The moment we focus on grades over learning, competition over cooperation, quantity over quality, appearance over passion, outcomes over process, learning dies. I know letting go is easier said than done in this competitive world. But when was the world not competitive? Are we the first to live in interesting times? Besides, love of learning is still, I believe, the number one competitive advantage we can give to our children.