Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results, NYTimes, 1.2.25.
In a polarized nation, one point of agreement deserves more attention: Young adults say they feel woefully unprepared for life in the work force, and employers say they’re right.
In a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. Employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.
There’s a reason the system isn’t serving people well, and it goes beyond the usual culprits of social media and Covid. Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks — because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.
Giving kids agency doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean lowering expectations, turning education into entertainment or allowing children to choose their own adventure. It means requiring them to identify and pursue some of their own goals, helping them build strategies to reach those goals, assessing their progress and guiding them to course-correct when they fall short.
Learning to "drive":
No adult can force a student to be self-driven. Children develop the skill the way they learn anything else: with practice. The act of setting the goal makes it more meaningful. When we visited Carmen Arellano, a teacher at Arthur Kramer Elementary School in Dallas, she had students set learning goals for every class she taught, and when they met them, “they chase me down in the hallway to tell me,” she said. “I think it just really makes them proud of what they’ve accomplished.” [...]
As the developmental psychologist Aliza Pressman says: “Let kids do for themselves what they can already do. And guide and encourage them to do things they can almost do. And then teach and model for them the things that they can’t do.” This is how parents can help their children build agency.
Change the goal of eduction:
Maybe it’s time to define a higher ideal for education, less about ranking and sorting students on narrow measures of achievement and more about helping young people figure out how to unlock their potential and how to operate in the world. Amid the drumbeat of evolving artificial intelligence, wars, rising authoritarianism, political polarization and digital disconnection, they need to learn a lot more than how to follow instructions.
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