My husband and I were driving through a Gold Coast suburb last weekend when we passed a tall brick building with these words emblazoned on the side:

“BE SAFE.
“BE RESPECTFUL.
“BE A LEARNER.”

On first impression, this school seems to be representing a sound set of values, but the more I thought about it, the more troubling I found them.

Firstly, “BE SAFE”:

Do we really want our children to be second-guessing their every move in order to ‘be safe’? What about: 

“BE BRAVE!
“TAKE RISKS!
“EXPLORE!
“DISCOVER!”?

Aren’t those more enlivening values than ‘be safe’? 

Image courtesy Goumbik & Pexels

As a mother, I’d always nervously hang onto my kids’ clothing when they got too close to the edge of some high place, but I didn’t need to. Their own native sense of self-preservation would ensure that they didn’t do anything too silly. It’s called our ‘life urge’. Most of us have more of a life urge than a death urge.

Granted, accidents happen and we should be aware of our surroundings, especially if we are in a dangerous environment, but a reasonable degree of awareness is sufficient; I don’t think we should be primed to move forward so cautiously that we miss out on the adventures life can offer us.

My kids were mostly home-educated, but there was one school that I seriously considered because their information kit declared that students would be free to climb trees and use knives. I loved that. It meant that their students were encouraged to explore, discover, take risks, and learn from their mistakes. (The founder was well-known Australian author, John Marsden, a man with a most creative mind, though now deceased.)

After all, we wouldn’t have seven billion people on this planet if we didn’t have that instinct for self-preservation!

“BE A LEARNER.”

I found this instruction equally disturbing. 

What is a child BUT a learner? We were designed to learn. Learning is instinctive in children. Why on earth does the idea of it need to be drilled?

I’ll tell you why: because of the false environments in which children are ‘schooled’. (Read: moulded, shaped, formed…) Because what they are ‘learning’ is what an external body decided they should learn, and not necessarily what they are inspired to learn.

Children are schooled to be passive regurgitators, to run through mazes for rewards, respond to bells, stand in lines, follow rules… To do what they’re told.

If we want our children to flourish, we only need to free them from false, imposed curricula and empower them to learn the things that really matter, that naturally impact their lives and the lives of the people around them.

I will never forget my son’s experiences with maths when he was 14. He was hating and resisting the subject, so I enrolled him in a Kumon Centre for extra tuition. Those environments are great for some but were disastrous for him – he tested up as being at the math level of a grade-four student. I knew that he was better than that. 

Soon after that short-lived experiment, I took him to a staircase builder for work experience. When I picked my son up at the end of the day, I was told that he was sharper at maths than the Year 10 boys from the local private school who came for work experience, that he was great with people, and that he would probably make a brilliant entrepreneur.

The real measure of the two experiences was my son’s energy: shining eyes and enthusiastic after doing a man’s work with a real staircase builder in a genuine workshop among the wood shavings and tools, by comparison with sulky and frustrated after an hour or so sitting at a table doing repetitive, simple equations with little children. 

Whenever I see a young child being sedated with a screen (e.g. toddler sitting in a shopping trolley playing some device while mum shops and not seeing, hearing, smelling anything happening around them), I feel sad. Pushing keys on a keypad for rewards might keep them quiet but it’s not true learning. More importantly, it’s not aliveness or engagement with the world,

Image courtesy Snapwire & Pexels

“BE RESPECTFUL.”

This has to be the least offensive of the three instructions, but, surely, if we model respect do we need to shout it from the school walls? 

Respect goes two ways: from youth to elders, and from elders to youth. If the elders model respect to their students and their peers, surely that culture will be absorbed and adopted effortlessly by the community, rather than needing to be preached?

We trust that the Education Department means well with that trio of commands, but when you scratch the surface, the true values being revealed are not inspiring (to my mind).

Of course there are thousands of brilliant, inspiring teachers and hundreds of wonderful schools, and many children who emerge relatively unscathed from the system; I’m just questioning the wisdom of dumbing down our kids with instructions like these; of making their environment so innocuous that it ceases to be challenging or enlivening.

Am I making too much of these ‘innocent education values’?

Let’s sidestep into the corporate arena… I’ve been privy to quite a number of examples of poor corporate management over the last few years. It’s been shocking, to say the least. 

I can’t help wondering if the ‘Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be A Learner’ schooling ultimately gives rise to the corporate experience where employees must:

• keep their jobs safe by not speaking up when their managers make unwise decisions;

• disrespect themselves and tolerate mistreatment because the manager’s mind is closed;

• learn that the Manager Knows Best, and a closed-door policy is the best one for the organisation.

The phrase that two corporate workers I know have used is that they must “lobotomise themselves” and just endure until they clock off or retire because their managers are not open to feedback from the people ‘on the shop floor’.

What a world we are creating…

I was delighted and inspired to learn about this book, Hunter, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, which seems to offer the remedy. Check it out. 

Speaking of remedies, stand by for the launch of my new podcast, “Remedy & Revelation – Uncovering truth and healing, one story at a time.”