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Finding Success
Life Learning Children Can Define it on Their Own
By Wendy Priesnitz
School is said to have many
purposes, including socialization and enculturation. (I think that, in reality, it’s
mostly about being a place for kids to go during the adult working day,
but that is a different issue.) For many people, school’s main purpose involves preparing kids to become
a “successful” adult. And, of course, the flipside of that is many
people’s concern that lack of school equates to lack of success in
adulthood.
That concern is ill-founded for
two reasons. One: some of the world’s most financially successful people
have little formal schooling. Two: the definition of success is a very
personal one.
Financial success and status are
the main concern of those who worry that kids who haven’t attended
school won’t be prepared for adulthood. If you were to persuade those
people to dig a bit deeper, they might expand the definition to include
happiness, career satisfaction, becoming active citizens, and other more
esoteric things. But being a financially functioning adult – i.e.
supporting self, family, and the economy – is the biggest component of
most people’s definition of success. I’ve written in earlier articles
about my belief that life learners are well prepared for this sort of
success...if they want it.
Of course, not everyone frames
success in terms of money. According to a definition
often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson,
to have succeeded is “to have laughed often, to have won the respect of
intelligent people and the affection of children, to have earned the
appreciation of honest critics, to have endured the betrayal of false
friends, to have appreciated beauty, and to have left the world a better
place, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social
condition.”
School doesn’t teach most of
those things. Nor does it teach what Stephen Downes – a
senior researcher for Canada’s National Research Council and a leading
proponent of the use of online media in learning – thinks leads to
whatever definition of success one might have. He says the route to
success means knowing how to:
- predict consequences
- read
- distinguish truth from fiction
- empathize
- be creative
- communicate clearly
- learn
- stay healthy
- value yourself
- live meaningfully
School doesn’t do much about
those things either.
However, young children are good
at being successful on their own. They
laugh a lot, are self-regulating and self-confident. They appreciate
beauty, are creative, and learn easily. They ask incisive questions and
constantly experiment. But all of that can be turned off by well-meaning
adults trying to prepare them for “success.” They can be made to feel
self-conscious when they don’t appear to achieve the gold star prize of
outwardly-defined success. And then the destination becomes
all-important and the process irrelevant.
My adult-induced neurotic
perfectionism has taken me many years to overcome. In school and at
home, I learned that being successful is good, and that non-success –
aka failure – is bad. Failure comes with shame and ridicule, rather than
being a simple
step in the learning process. Fear of failure is paralyzing. It
makes us focus on trying not
to fail. We become passive and avoid taking risk. We hold ourselves back
from living fully and, ironically, from opportunities for “success.”
And that brings us back yet
again to the respect and dignity that are such an important part of
autonomous parenting. If our children are living life on their own
terms, rather than trying to meet someone else’s expectations, they will
be successful. Over and over again.
Wendy Priesnitz is Life Learning
Magazine’s founder and editor. She is the mother two adult daughters who
learned without school in the 1970s and ‘80s, a life learning advocate
for over 40 years, and the author of thirteen books, with a couple more in
process.
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