As a society, we are buying into an incredibly narrow and harmful view of what schools are for, and what is possible within them. Largely, we are taught to accept analyses of test scores, comparisons of attainment by race and class, and accept that the purpose of schooling was primarily social mobility. Our questions about equity seem largely limited to, “how can we make sure poor kids can compete with wealthy kids for an ever-decreasing number of jobs at the top?”
We are moving forward with good intentions — but we are asking the wrong questions and thus solving the wrong problems. When we focus on how to better move children through the system and measure their performance at each level we end up with a system that is chewing up children — children of all socioeconomic statuses. It’s not working for poor children, not for wealthy children, not for educators or administrators, and not for politicians, the economy, and *definitely* not for our democracy.
We have the opportunity to re-design…let’s do it from what we know about how humans flourish and how strong communities and democracies thrive.
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This is a theory of change emerging from Why School?: A Systems Perspective on Creating Schooling for Flourishing Individuals & a Thriving Democratic Society. It starts with a discussion of what a good life is, the role of school in helping to create it, and what gets in the way. Then presents concrete design principles for school environments and experiences (pedagogy).
But here’s the thing. Exactly what these five look like in any given person’s life can appear dramatically different. For example, for productive work, some people are Olympic horseback riders, others drive trucks, others teach, or create art. Or, in rewarding relationships, some people want two close friends, while others want a large network. And we are all express ourselves and are engaged and involved in our community in different ways.
Life potentialities realized are thus the outcomes of the ways our choices interact with the options and paths available to us in our world.
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This means that to live a good life that is right for us personally, we need to be able to make informed choices about the options available to us, aligned with our values and our unique constellation of personal preferences and strengths.
This aligns well with how Aristotle philosophized about a happy or “eudaimonic” life. He said a good life results when an individual able to take deliberative action, aligned with their values, strengths, interests. He argues this requires they live in a society in which they have both: 1) the freedom to make these choices, and 2) their basic needs met — because if your basic needs aren’t met, all of your choices are oriented toward meeting them and this is not freedom or flourishing.
We flourish when our core needs are met, we have the freedom to make choices about our lives, and we find our choices to be meaningful and fulfilling.
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You could think of Martin Seligman’s model for flourishing — PERMA — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Achievement — as being most realized when we have made the choices that best work for us.
Every time we make choices about how to behave or which path to take, they are an expression of these three parts of who we are. The process of making choices is also called, “agentive action”. Schools develop all three aspects of agentive action, whether they’re intentionally designed or not.
Importantly, the options available to us also differ based on when and where we live and, often our race or socioeconomic status. For an obvious example, if you live in France in 1919, the options available to you to choose from for productive work are different than if you live in 2019 Silicon Valley. However, they also differ between a wealthy or middle-class white person living in the suburbs of New York and a low-income black person living in rural Alabama.
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Furthermore, as above, we cannot be considered to be flourishing if our core needs are not met, even if we are making choices about our lives. First and foremost, equity is about ensuring all people in our society — and all children in our schools — have their core social psychological and physiological needs met.
Should the available options available to us not be what we want to choose, or if there are options that are unequally available or unjust, we need the key capacity of being able to work with others to change the distribution or create different options.
Current work with youth is fundamentally about developing the three aspects of agentive action (capacities, character, and beliefs) so that young people can make informed choices about how they want to live their lives — now and in the future. The connection between youth programs and adult flourishing is not direct — you don’t just learn content knowledge, graduate, then flourish — it’s through the interaction between people’s choices about their lives and the options they have available to them, that flourishing is achieved.
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The word “identity” has ancient Latin roots — it means “repeated beingness.” Who you are, your sense of your self, is largely formed by what you do repeatedly. In other words, how we live our lives today is who we will become.
Work with youth cannot be about acquiring some “good” for future use, but rather it must be about practicing capacities daily. Students spend around 14, 000 hours in school from K-12 in the U.S. — they become experts in the kinds of humans they practice being there. As Aristotle notes, “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference”[2].
It’s through the practice of the character, beliefs, and capacities that allow for informed choices in childhood that adults are best prepared to take agentive action in the future. It’s by focusing on flourishing (or creativity/curiosity/relationships/agency, etc.) now that thriving in the future is most likely to happen.
Human Flourishing (flowers Texture)\\
Our “self” is our core identity. It is constantly evolving and is developed in dialectic relationship with our physical and social environments. The individual as an organism is consistently striving to create a complex, stable sense of self. To do this, an individual must both integrate their experiences into a holistic, aligned sense of self, and also differentiate themselves as an individual[3].
To be able to flourish — to learn, self-actualize, develop competencies, employ our values consistently, or reach our potential humans — we need a physical and social environment that fosters our growth. Just like plants need the right mix of sun, soil, and water, for humans to grow to our full potential, our physiological and four core social psychological needs (Autonomy, Competence, Connection, and Meaning[4]) must be filled.
These are fundamental core needs because when they are not filled an individual will: a) experience detrimental effects on their physical and mental well-being; b) consistently seek their fulfillment, often subconsciously; and, c) potentially risk physiological threat to fulfill them.
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How we structure schools needs to create environments that provide ways to meet these needs and remove obstacles to their fulfillment. If we do not, there is no way student potential can be fulfilled. To be clear, I’m not saying that potential can be maximized if we do x and y, thing — I agree with Carol Dweck that potential is both unknown and unknowable. However, you could think of this as being analogous to when a plant is in too small of a pot or in too dark a corner — it’s not that the plant won’t stay alive or even grow some, but it won’t grow as much as it could have if it had its needs filled.
While knowing the outcomes (e.g. a graduate profile) we want to produce is important, gardening is a better metaphor than engineering when trying to achieve these outcomes.
The agency of people and the importance of environment in any person’s development results in three implications to keep in mind when designing and implementing interventions:
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What happens in a day or hour might contribute, but the real outcomes we care about happen slowly, over time, and there are dormant periods followed by spurts of growth.
In manufacturing or engineering you take discreet elements and make a new whole. In gardening the elements for successful maturation are already in the seed, the gardener provides the environment. If you place an acorn on concrete and it doesn’t become an oak tree it’s not because there’s something wrong with the acorn — nearly every acorn has the potential to grow into an oak tree — you just have to plant them in the right soil. The same is true of children.
In manufacturing you can spot the defect and fix it with an intervention to come out with a perfect, defect-free product that is precisely the same as the last one, every time. But with gardening, as with humans, we want beautiful variation of outcome.
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Adopting a gardening metaphor has important implications for measurement
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