It's up to you.... (Part 4/4)
Dear Packy,
So where are your kids going to learn to be innovators? If you want to, as you say, create an education for your son “that cultivates his curiosity and builds his love for learning” then recognize that it’s up to you to create that education. There is no single place that you can send them that will take care of it, no matter if it’s public, private, Synthesis or Primer. Frankly, it's too important to put in the hands of somebody else as whoever it is will not going to care as much about your child’s education nor be as exacting as you will. You have to be the designer of your child’s education.
Second, recognize school is only one piece of your child's educational experience. Other resources include you and what you teach, athletics, extracurricular enrichments, activities like Scouts, summer camps like Galileo and on and on. The challenge is to fit all these pieces together based on what‘s important to you and what you know about your child. This part will be different for everyone based on the resources available and what you know about your child, so I can only share what we did.
Start by thinking about preschool first - both because it comes first and because it’s likely the most important. Go sit in the classes and see what resonates. When we started researching early childhood education, we quickly found that Montessori resonated deeply. The idea of having a prepared environment in which children can explore, the emphasis on creative problem-solving and practical life skills, the long (three-hour) uninterrupted work periods, the rituals around solving interpersonal dynamics (peace table) all just made sense to us. In fact, it seems like how the rest of us learn, once we get out of school. The fact that many of the entrepreneurs that I admire attended Montessori and credit the Montessori approach with some of their creative problem-solving made it even better.
I also loved the constructivist approach-that kids need to discover the world and build their own frameworks for learning. In one simple example, Montessori kids learn multiplication using a dimpled board and placing marbles on it. So they can quickly grasp that 3x2 is the same as 2×3. Numbers are taught with beads representing the placeholders. All of these ideas just made sense to us. My kids thrived in Montessori and emerged as excited, curious scholars reading far above their grade levels.
After preschool, and with a little more clarity on how your child learns, revisit the planning process to think about elementary school. For us, it came down to public, private and “other”, also known as crazy. Each has its risks and its benefits based on the schools available. It's worth noting that although public schools do have real issues (teacher shortage, crazy legislation like “don’t say gay”, book banning, etc.), the vast majority of parents in the public school system are happy with their child’s experience. After 20 years of experience with Oakland public schools, we decided that wasn’t the right path for us, nor was a private school after my own experience with private schools in Nashville. That left “crazy”.
We were still entranced with the idea of Montessori and had accidentally assembled a dream team of school founders at the private Montessori preschool we attended. We were at the school picnic one spring and discussing what we should do for kindergarten when somebody tossed out the idea of "why don't we just start a public Montessori charter school?". If we had any idea what that journey would entail, we would've all giggled and walked away. But we didn't and two years later, driven by the vision of Montessori for all (just like it is in the rest of the world) we opened the doors of Urban Montessori Charter School. Having clear ideas of how we wanted to educate our children and seeing them come to fruition was among the most rewarding experiences of my life, especially since it is now a thriving learning community in Oakland with 400 scholars. But it was also among the hardest experiences too as we tried to balance the financial constraints, teacher constraints, community conflicts, testing requirements, and everything else that being a public school entails.
We found that crazy has its risks too. Because at some point, if your child wants to go to college, you have to plug back into the system. Unless your child cured cancer in middle school, is a D1 athlete or you create the Packy McCormick Student Center, colleges want transcripts they understand with all of their prerequisites met. When we took a closer look at what our kids knew after middle school, we found that, while creative and confident, they were missing important prerequisite knowledge to be on track with their peers. And even worse, after years in a relatively unstructured Montessori classroom, they had little experience in how to study, sequence their work or plan their time. With time, we can solve this in our school, but not for our kids.
Which brings me to the last point, paraphrased from the German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Be ready to change your plans as you and your children grow and learn. Our daughter, “tired of being EXPERIMENTED on for my ENTIRE educational career in schools YOU started” (just imagine the foot stomp), is finishing high school at a large comprehensive public high school. Our son attends an elite private school with 16 kids in each Socratic seminar - one of the most luscious learning experiences I could imagine. It's not what I envisioned when I founded Urban Montessori 12 years ago but it seems to be the best solution given what we know now.
I want to leave you with one last quote from Robert Fulghum, who wrote “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”:
Don’t worry that your kids never listen to you, worry that they are always watching you.
Your kids will be like you. They will move like you, behave like you, laugh like you and move through the world like you. More than any other influence, including school, they will learn by watching you and how you interact with the world. So educating them is just being the example of what you want them to be.
Good luck. Just asking this question means you are going to do great.
Parker
PS - It's worth noting that this situation is not the fault of teachers or of any single individual in the system. There are irrepressible teachers at every school. It's the system itself. We designed and built the system for a different world. Now it's so fossilized by teacher’s unions, state requirements (like UC’s A-G requirements), federal regulations (No Child Left Behind), and our own cultural constructs (no, not everyone needs to go to college) that it’s both hard to imagine something different and nearly impossible to see a path there. While Primer is a great option for parents who have the time, money and bravery to build an educational experience on their own, we have to find a way to reform the system for everyone. Yes, big innovations start small and on the edges, but this is a truly wicked problem.
PSS - as a few WoP compatriots requested, here's a list of books that have been incredibly helpful on the journey:
Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World
What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers across America
That Used to Be Us