No matter what everyone is touting; the path to success is not measured by traditional measures alone; it sure doesn’t present itself within the amount of money one earns, the cars one owns, or the number of homes one has within one’s real estate portfolio. And within the context of high school, success is not guaranteed or assured within high stakes achievement testing, grade point averages, and SAT scores.
However, there was an extraordinary window of understanding that presented itself most recently within an article written for The Atlantic. Ashley Lamb-Sinclair shares the following sentiments in review of the American high school experience [“What if High School was More Like Kindergarten”]: “… Yet, companies have begun to recognize that traditional education does not always equate to success in the business world. Google has said that it has found no correlation between GPAs and test scores and employees who thrive, and therefore has stopped looking at those academic qualifications altogether. Goldman Sachs has made an effort to hire beyond Ivy League schools, finding that a “top quality” education didn’t really provide top quality job candidates. Some companies such as Deloitte no longer require college degrees at all—even for professional positions. And if that weren’t enough proof that traditional paths to career success can be misleading, seldom do current measures of high-school success guarantee success in college. In fact, according to a Gallup poll of high-school students, the No. 1 measure of college success is a sense of hope for the future”.
You got to love this one for the notion of feeling hopeful for one’s future is relatively easy. It’s really about helping students discover the gift within, their passion, a sense of purpose, or meaning in what they do. Often, this comes in the form of service to others. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who devoted his life to studying, understanding and promoting “meaning, shared the following sentiment: ”“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
So if we really want to do something remarkable for our kids by developing the most extraordinary educational system possible, we need to honor the truth presented in this research: it’s time we provide our children an education which is founded upon hope, faith, purpose, passion, and infinite possibilities. For anything else, will likely kill the spirit within, and create a generation of hopeless, depressed, and anxiety riddled young adults. In fact, we may be down this path more so than we thought. According to a recent USA Today article: “Teens across the USA are feeling high levels of stress that they say negatively affect every aspect of their lives, a new national survey suggests. More than a quarter (27%) say they experience “extreme stress” during the school year, vs. 13% in the summer. And 34% expect stress to increase in the coming year. Stressors range from school to friends, work and family. And teens aren’t always using healthy methods to cope, finds the latest Stress in America survey from the Washington, D.C.-based American Psychological Association. Findings on more than 1,000 teens and almost 2,000 adults suggest that unhealthy behaviors associated with stress may start early and continue through adulthood. With 21% of adults reporting “extreme” stress levels, the survey says that with teens “mirroring adults’ high-stress lives” they are “potentially setting themselves up for a future of chronic stress and chronic illness.”
If this resonates with you, and you feel it’s time to do something different for your son or daughter, give me a call or write. It’s never too early to start thinking about the long-term and the impact of education on our kids. From what I see, from the education advocate lens, the most extraordinary students are those who feel a deep sense of purpose, promise, or potential within. And in these cases, it’s a matter of nurturing the emerging gifts, interests, and expressions within. Based upon the origin of “educate”, the latin is “educere”, which translated means to” lead out”. Simply, it’s time for our educational system to bring forth, to unveil, and to lead out, the gifts within. For the most successful students are those who have developed a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and promise. Nothing else will do.