These are Golden Times and Confusing Times

This may be the golden age of education choice. It is also a complicated time for parents because of all those choices. In recent years learning opportunities and educational institutions and resources have exploded. Now parents are faced more than ever with a dizzying array of choices about which school is best and even whether formal school is best.

This blog focuses primarily on choices involving schools. I’ll write more in another blog more about homeschooling options.

We Need to Consider Specific Schools

Specific school options vary with location. School philosophies, principles, and practices often differ, sometimes radically, even between schools with the same brand names. For example, not all public schools are created equal; actual practices depend on administration, faculty, parents, resources, and other factors.  

Brief descriptions of a few of the many options can be found here: https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/education/blog/types-of-schools/

Big Issues For Parents

As a parent and an educator with over 20 years of experience, I have found a few big issues related to learning that can really help to simplify school choice. Here is my shortlist:

• Each child is wonderful and different. When I was a young parent, my wife and I visited with a dear friend who is a beautiful mother of successful, vibrant adult children. We asked her for advice about educating our new daughters. She shared with us wisdom that has lasted through the years and has been applied in many settings. She said something like this: “Each child is different. Each should be considered carefully as an individual. What works for one may not work for the other. One may thrive in a particular school while another needs a different learning path. Each child should be considered for who they are – what are her interests? What are her areas of special genius? Children also change as they develop, so education needs to be considered and adapted throughout their lifespan. I realize that in some cases individualized paths are out of reach for some families, for a variety of very good reasons. There is hope in the next point – children are resilient.
• Children are resilient, adaptable learners.  When children know they are safe and that the people around them care for them, they will learn well. I have found that children will learn tremendously and develop with well-being in many settings. We don’t need to stress too much about getting everything perfect.  
• Children learn all the time. They learn voraciously and constantly, consciously and subconsciously. This means that little things matter. The little things I prioritize include aspects of the learning environment related to feelings of security, respect for my children, healthy relationships between children and adults, great inspiring examples of current and historical people, and rich sources for sparking curiosity and feeding self-motivated learning. I also look for integration of numeracy/mathematics, communication/language, science (as a body of knowledge and a process), art, music, and movement, with plenty of time to experience and grow in all these areas.
• Learning outdoors and in nature conveys tremendous benefits – emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual. Many years ago I might have thought this was true only for particular people. Now I believe that some children do have particular interests and a sense of well-being in nature, but also that nature-based learning is really beneficial for most young people. Abundant research supports the idea that experiences in nature are generally helpful (1).
• What happens at home and outside of school matters. The home environment is crucial for development, including academic and future skills development. Influential aspects of home life include relationships with parents and also nutrition, sleep, reading, screen time, and exercise. No home life is perfect, but as we search for school options, it is well to remember that what happens at home and outside of school will impact the education of our children profoundly – probably even more profoundly than what they experience at school.  
• The test of the happy child. Educators talk about formative and summative assessments. Parents may become experts in formative assessments, which just means that parents learn (or can learn) to monitor their children to see how they are doing. One big test is whether your child seems happy, creative, and interested in learning. If not, it may be time to change up the school situation; more on this later. If they are happy, acting creatively and with curiosity and are interested in learning, that is a good sign that what they’ve got may be working pretty well. I believe that many learning environments would pass this test for any individual, and I am confident that sufficient learning could happen in many of these various, happy settings.
• Human relationships crucially benefit learning. Time and again we see that one one-on-one interactions between a child and a teacher make a big difference in learning and in the child’s sense of well-being. I have seen huge leaps of progress when a child has a teacher or mentor who really knows and cares about them, and when the child knows that. Think back to your own teachers and how you felt when you knew they really cared about you. How does a child know their teacher cares for them? There are many ways spoken and not spoken. I think children are great at picking up on whether an adult cares for them. In-person relationships are therefore important, and this is, I believe, particularly true for younger children.
• Community matters. Children benefit from relationships with people of different ages and personalities. A lively community speaks to different modes of learning and intelligences. We also know that children generally and naturally read more when they are around people who read, tend to like math more when the people around them like math, and are more active in more active groups. As humans we are built for learning together.

Planning for Future Success

We are facing an unpredictable future. Opportunities and challenges a decade from now are very hard to predict with much precision right now. How do we as parents include considering the future in our school choices? And how should schools teach for the future?

Thomas Hatch,  a professor at Columbia University set out on a Fulbright Scholarship to evaluate the top-performing schools around the world. He wrote:

“The education we need for both today and tomorrow has to be responsive, flexible, and forward-looking: ready for the next generation, not the last…The difficulties of planning for the future reflect the fact that both our children and the society around us are changing. Under these circumstances, as a parent, I try as best I can to pay attention to my children, to who they are and who they might want to be. I try to help them develop the skills, expertise, dispositions, and agency to take advantage of the opportunities around them and to expose and address whatever challenges they face.” (2)

Conclusion

A few big issues can simplify complicated school choices. We can be confident as parents and educators that by ensuring a few key elements, our children will learn well. And we can be reassured that there is no perfect situation. When life requires tradeoffs in education choices, when we are not able to find or take advantage of the apparently ideal situation for a particular child, we can look to the simple big issues and be reassured that our child can still learn enough for a life of well-being. At the same time, there are some fine-scaled situations that work better than others. I will write more about those in a following blog.

References

• For more on the benefits of experiences with nature see M. Kuo, M. Barnes, and C. Jordan. 2019. Do experiences with nature promote learning? Converging evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship. Frontiers in Psychology 10 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305
• T. Hatch. J. Corson, S. Gerth van den Berg. 2021. The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict. Corwin