For forty years, I had a front-row seat to American education. I began as a teacher, moved into administration, and spent the final twenty-eight years of my career as a Head of School in independent K–8 schools. During that time, I watched thousands of students navigate the obstacle course known as childhood. While parents often worried about math scores, reading levels, and whether little Madison was on track for an Ivy League acceptance letter before she lost her baby teeth, our schools placed a strong emphasis on something less measurable but far more important: character in our youngest students and leadership in our oldest. We believed that learning how to be a good person was every bit as important as learning how to solve for x.
Unfortunately, modern education has increasingly treated intellectual achievement as the gold standard of success. Schools have become very good at producing students who can analyze, debate, argue, and defend almost any position imaginable. What they have not always produced are adults who can disagree respectfully, act with integrity, admit mistakes, or place the common good ahead of personal advantage. As a society, we now have plenty of people capable of winning arguments and far too few interested in building trust. We seem to have confused being clever with being wise. One gets you followers on social media; the other helps hold a democracy together.
The good news is that there is another path. Schools can create a vision of success that is available to every student regardless of academic gifts, family background, or intellectual predisposition. Character traits such as courage, responsibility, resilience, generosity, and positive mindset are not reserved for the gifted and talented program. They are available to everyone. If schools devoted the same energy to developing character that they currently devote to test scores, we might graduate a generation of leaders capable of tackling the complex challenges ahead. Our nation does not suffer from a shortage of intelligence. It suffers from a shortage of people willing to use their intelligence in service of something larger than themselves.
We welcome you to the conversation. Please let us know that you care by liking comments, forwarding posts, or joining in our dialogue at johnzurn.com. We would love to hear your own “Stories From the Classroom….”.
From our first posting:
“As parents and teachers, we need to reclaim our traditional role as influencers of our children – not by shouting louder than the influencers our children discover online, but by stressing ideas that are more important than fancy shoes and snappy TikTok tunes. We need to emphasize traits that everyone agrees children will honor. We need to convince our children that the people who are most important to them have a better understanding of what it takes to be successful in life.”
#charactereducation #successtraits #parentingtips #homeschooling #teachertips