seek not to make them like you

I'm always grateful when Post Oak parents send me articles to read about parenting and education.  I enjoy our shared dialog, and it reminds me of their keen interest in topics that shape my profession.


In the past few days Richard Yoo sent me "Why children need chores" from the Wall Street Journal, and Vasanthi Jayaraman sent me "How to survive the college admission madness" from the NY Times.


Both articles challenge our current parenting practices and beliefs.  Both fly in the face of our fears.


I love seeing the various books, essays and articles I read grate against each other, sparking flame like iron and flint.  I first thought to analyze the themes of these two articles.  My second thought was, "Where do these two articles send me?" 


The answer?  To Kahlil Gibran's 1923 classic, The Prophet and the verse-essay "On children."  Here's what I read:


"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.


You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."

How Montessori Prepared Me For College

I told them I went to a Montessori school. You would think people would just say “okay” and move on, but that rarely occurred. No, this question always launched a number of others.

“Isn’t that just for preschoolers?”

“Isn’t that for super smart people?”

“You really went to a Montessori school?”

“Is that a real place?”

Six years later, as I go through college, I have come to the realization that the Montessori education I received in elementary and middle school did more than just prepare me for high school- It prepared me for college, too.


In what ways? Read on.

Not my best parenting moment

Here's a blog posting by Scott Dannemiller, "The one question every parent should stop asking."


He goes on to say, "As parents, we focus 100 percent of our energy asking the wrong question...Bottom line: we parents need to chill out and change our questions. Here are two (questions) that can help us all gain some perspective and start finding more genuine joy in our lives."

Want to know the two questions Dannemiller suggests we ask?  Follow the link.  It's a good read.

Parents, calm down

A recent post on the blog Rox and Roll: the Cacaphony of Motherhood has stirred up a bit of controversy:  "Parents: Let Harvard Go." 


Rox's post was precipitated by several teen suicides close to home and a You Tube video posted by one of her neighbors, sixteen year old Martha Cabot, who attends Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California.


Is Rox encouraging the acceptance of mediocrity?  No, as a former admission officer at an Ivy League school, and another "Ivy equivalent" on the West Coast, she has an insider's view of the college admission process and she considers life in the college admission pressure cooker a public health issue.


Read on, parents.

Excellent Sheep?

Here's a reference from NAIS' "Education in the News:"

Colleges Make It Easier for Students to Show, Not Tell, in Their Applications
By Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times (from September 27, 2014)
    (TOWSON, MD) – “Under the policy announced this month by Goucher, a 1,400-student liberal arts college near Baltimore, a prospective student may apply by submitting two pieces of work (at least one of them a graded high school writing assignment) and a two-minute video, rather than a high school transcript. José A. Bowen, Goucher’s new president, readily admits that he has no idea how many applicants will go that route, how many will be accepted or whether they will work out.
    Students, parents and academics have long complained that competition for admission to highly selective colleges has become an overwhelming ordeal that favors bright but conventional, privileged worker bees over peers whose trials or quirks have gotten in the way of school. That is one of the criticisms in a much-discussed new book, “Excellent Sheep,” by William Deresiewicz, and a growing number of colleges have tried to address it.”

Googling "Excellent Sheep" led me to Nathan Heller's intelligent rebuttal of Deresiewicz in his New Yorker article "Poison Ivy?"  ("I went to college early in this century when the drug of choice on campus was sleep deprivation.")

This is not the same argument as Denise Pope's 2003 book Doing School, whose subtitle is: How we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic and miseducated students., though all three works would be on the syllabus of the same Graduate-level M.Ed. course at a top-tier university. (Pope is a prof at Stanford; Deresiewicz graduated from Columbia and taught at Yale; Heller graduated from Harvard.) 

Connect the dots and their dialog is all about the pressure and the presumed value of entrance to elite colleges in the early 21st century, and the impact that has on individual students and ultimately, our culture.

All of this leaves me looking for an antidote. 

I went first to Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak.  Listen to your inner voice, he says, and find your vocation.  I suppose my own elite education in the last century encouraged me to seek meaning in my life; to contribute to the culture, to advance it, and in so doing to be of service.

That is my aspiration for our students at The Post Oak School.