Dear colleague,
Yesterday I gave a (very rough draft) recorded talk on whether or not school and its definitions of success are outdated. Basically, I argued that:
- Success isn't a useful word anymore because it means both too much and too little.
- Our collective lack of clarity around success breeds many of the frustrations and time-wastes and soul-sucks that typify contemporary schooling for too many adults and children (cf. Greg McKeown's Essentialism).
- These two problems aren't inevitable and could be significantly altered if we took up better, saner ways of thinking about success. And mind you, while it would be ideal if the whole system/culture took up these views, merely resolving to take them up ourselves can (and does) produce a significantly positive difference in what is otherwise an untenable situation.
These were the three most important slides I used:
First up, this is what schools are for: the promotion of long-term flourishing via teaching students toward mastery of disciplines. Doing the work of learning with the care it takes to get good at math or science or art or music is an incredibly good way to prepare for a good, full life. Woe to those who see the Value of a thing only through the impoverished lens of “when will I ever need this?”
You can picture the school journey and school's purpose like this mountain graphic. What we're all after — for ourselves, for our children, for our society — is long-term flourishing.
But the pursuit of long-term flourishing isn't a technicolor montage set to a rock ballad. In a school setting, the pursuit of long-term flourishing is the day-in, day-out work of reading, writing, speaking, building knowledge, arguing, asking questions, and practicing.
Finally, long-term flourishing is more than fuzzy language. We can conceive of it rigorously using Martin Seligman's career-capping PERMA framework (cf. Flourish), pictured above.
This idea of PERMA is a really timely one, I think. Folks who envision a techno-optimist future where AI does it all for us? They underestimate the degree to which doing hard things (e.g., learning math, practicing science, etc.) is part of what it takes to flourish as a human being. That's not my thinking — it's essentially Seligman's. And when we help our students to actually learn, actually grow, actually acquire mastery, we set the stage for flourishing in the moment (here's a timestamped link for minute 22:13 in the talk where I share Caleb N's eighth grade ELA story) and flourishing long-term.
If you want to see the real thing, click the link above. If not, this blog post gives you a quick (and I hope encouraging) summary.
Best,
DSJR
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