Fostering the Right Attitudes
[Sponsored Article]
By Dr. Jadis Blurton, Founder and Head of School
“Is it hard?”
“Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard.”
– Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
One of my favorite amusements recently has been watching people react to students at The Harbour School. There is that momentary startle, with the widening of the eyes and the slight lift of the eyebrows, then a bemused half smile, followed by a furtive glance at me with the age-old wordless “Oh my gosh” expression, then a return of attention to the student. So when a seven-year old explains, in casual conversation, that a Portuguese Man-of-War is not a jellyfish (“… but don’t worry, that’s a common misperception. It’s actually a colony of attached animals called zooids”) or a nine-year old launches into an explanation of antibiotic resistance or a middle-school student explains the constraints of furniture design for subsidized housing units, I love to watch the adults. In Kenya, when a team that included a hospital’s founder and the Head Nurse listened to pitches for the interior design of a new Learning Center that our students had designed and fully funded (considering factors including flexible positioning, hygiene and local sustainability), the team’s looks went back and forth from the students to me as though they were not entirely sure that I wasn’t practicing ventriloquism. Tour guides on school trips are amused to find that our students know more than most adult tourists about the countries they are visiting. People are surprised to hear that we have won the Odyssey of the Mind competition for the past three years in Hong Kong or that both of our teams were among the five finalists in Hong Kong’s Technovation Challenge and one won the competition for Judges’ Choice, while still bouncing along happily both during their presentations and between them. (“They’re so perky!” one person observed.)
But I’ve also begun to realize that folks are not just astonished because our kids are confident, passionate, knowledgeable, happy and impressive. What they are astonished at is that these kids study at The Harbour School, which describes itself as a progressive school. Progressive? Somehow, over the years, some people have begun to think that “progressive” is a synonym for “easy” and that students can’t possibly be learning if they are not at the same time mean and miserable. “But wait… isn’t that supposed to be the happy school? Don’t they have a boat?”
But that’s not what “progressive” means at all. Although there are lots of definitions of “progressive,” there are four that almost all progressive schools would agree to. And creating a school that can fulfill these characteristics is much more difficult that running a conventional school.
First, we know that we're not the ones who make learning fun. Learning is a natural instinct, and like most natural instincts it already is fun. Primates will work hard doing something they don’t like, just for the opportunity to work with a puzzle or learn something new. Learning is a positive reinforcement, like food. Four-year olds are constantly trying to learn all of the time, asking questions about everything from why the sky is blue to what a turtle has for breakfast, and two-year olds struggle over and over again to perfect a new skill like climbing over the sofa. Computer games that challenge and teach are billion-dollar industries. In order to make learning un-fun, one would have to do things like forcing children to sit for long periods in seats (which is unhealthy at any age), or create an atmosphere of anxiety where the stakes are too high to try something new and fail, or prohibit social interaction and create a competitive atmosphere where one student’s success is another’s failure. One would have to limit learning to what one person (the teacher) thinks is important, without considering relevance to the life and interests of the learner. So progressive schools try not to do those things.