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Note: This is the third article in The Myths of Education™ series. Read about Myths# 1 and 2 here or watch a 3-minute video interview.
Myth #3:
Our Approach to Education is Best for Teens
Some babies walk at 10 months and others don't walk until 17 months.
We accept this 70% performance gap and don't insist on rating babies' walking skills. We understand that by the time they reach first grade, we won't know-- or care-- who failed to walk at 12 months.
Why don't we apply this perspective to the rest of our children's lives? After all, we recognize that when these children are 35, no one will know or care how they performed in high school. Many teens have gifts and strengths that school doesn't develop and --like babies' walking-- may emerge later.
I found that a child's gifts may actually clash with the way he is expected to learn: the very gifts that will help him in life, hurt him in school. The conflict between teens' gifts and school demands is a good reason to question whether our approach to education is best for teens. Yet there is an even more fundamental reason to re-think this myth.
Our Approach Can Be Depressing
I discovered that our parent-educator-community-system is structured with what Martin Seligman identifies as the three crucial components of depression:
1. Repeated defeat
Every day, students meet defeat in the form of grades, tests, try-outs, rankings, honors and awards. And children whose gifts conflict with the way they are taught face defeat daily as they struggle to fit a mold that doesn't bring out what's best in them.
2. Lack of control
In most schools, teens don't control what to learn or how to learn it. They also have little control over who to learn from, and when or where to learn.
3. Explaining defeat as a problem with "me."
Depression occurs when we explain defeat by telling ourselves "it's a problem with me; it's my fault."
So let’s look at what adults teach teens: "Smart kids get good grades." "Hard-workers get good grades." "The best athletes make the cut." "There are few ‘gifted' students."
What message does a child take from this? "If my grades aren't good, I must not be smart." "If I work hard and don't do well, I must be dumb." "If I'm not selected for the "gifted" group, I must not be gifted."
In other words, "There must be something wrong with me."
Three Ways to Stop Teaching Depression
If reading this depressed you, stay tuned: First, our kids are resilient and many of them find ways to be happy despite the system. Second, we can change our approach. Here are a few things you can do:
1. Watch your language
Stop talking about grades as if they reflect something important about every teen's abilities. Gifts, strengths, and talents combine and develop in complex ways that grades cannot begin to measure.
Stop talking about only 10 or 30 or 50 "good colleges." Start talking about the bright, successful, thriving adults who were not good students.
2. Evaluate Less, Celebrate More
Cut back on the number of ways a teen is evaluated by someone else: tests, try-outs, grades, honor roll, and awards. Don't worry that teens won't learn resilience. Positive feelings increase resilience.
Celebrate every child's gifts even when they conflict with the curriculum.
3. Give Teens More Control
Give teens choices over how and what they learn. Create opportunities for student-driven learning. I found that teens in the bottom of their classes love to learn-when they learn on their own terms.
One last point: if you do nothing else, at least start by telling the teens in your life, "it's not you!"
News from the Author: Unwrap Your Teen’s Gifts is a parent workshop Dr. Ned Hallowell and I will give for parents who want to feel relieved and optimistic about their teens, with 10 specific ways to bring out the best and increase family happiness. On April 11 at Bentley College. Learn More Here or see http://www.positiveleaders.com/.
This article is abridged from one originally published on Positive Psychology News Daily and the original article is here.
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