The Power of Destinations
It is hard to picture now, but in the early days of widespread automobile ownership, families would, of their own volition, take Sunday drives—totally random, aimless driving around as a family. Just get in the car, don’t buckle up (no seat belts), and drive. For fun.
Can you imagine? Driving without a destination? I am tempted to try it out this coming Sunday without explaining what we are doing. I can hear the kids asking, “Wait, where are we going?” And me cheerfully, “Nowhere!” And then them, “I still don’t get it--we’re going where?” “I told you, nowhere!”
Thinking about Learning Gaps
There is certainly a case to be made for directionless wandering at times in life (backpacking in Europe comes to mind), but of late it has occurred to me that too much my kids’ education is more like ye old Sunday drives than I should be comfortable with.
There are a handful of familiar subjects that the traditional K-12 system is covering for our kids, including ELA, math, science, social studies/history, and whatever other odds and ends are currently in the mix (are we still doing shop?).
(I am ignoring the unnerving question of whether K-12 is actually covering these traditional topics, given all of the news reports of historic lows in test scores, which I have addressed in other posts, and, given the import of the issue to us parents, will cover further in future posts.)
But is that really it? When we are watching our kids cross the stage at their future graduation, take that diploma in stride, is that the full range of subjects that we want them to have a solid understanding of? Given the complexity of the world today, and our aspirations for the kids, it seems a bit thin.
Our kids will also learn through a series of extemporaneous Ted Talks that my wife and I will give, complete with flesh colored head mics, practiced casual hand gestures, and references to what we (meaning scientists) are learning about the importance of picking up after ourselves and not hitting our siblings.
They will also learn valuable lessons from coaches, and then there is the whole universe of life lessons they will learn from friends, whatever those might be.
That still leaves a substantial gap between what I believe my kids should know by the time they graduate K-12 and what has been officially mapped out for them, which is the line of thinking that suddenly brought the image to mind of the family in the car going for on that old school Sunday drive.
I will be deeply annoyed with myself if that line of thought hits me at graduation, that we were wandering when we should have had a destination. The good news is that there is a relatively easy fix to this issue, which I outline in this post, and it starts with fully appreciating the power of destinations.
Learning Destinations in the World of K-12
The idea of having destinations for learning is something that the K-12 system is familiar with, though in educational circles they use the term standards to refer to targets for student learning by grade and topic.
As it turns out—and you will be shocked by what I am about to share, if you didn’t already know this—we live in a time when establishing consensus on learning targets for just two topics is a surprisingly divisive and politically fraught exercise.
This process of developing national standards—which culminated in release of the Common Core State Standards in 2010—was sufficiently contentious that the effort stopped at ELA and math.
A number of states subsequently rejected the national standards and adopted their own state standards, which were suspiciously similar to the national ones, but offered the political cover a seeming rejection of the federal influence.
The whole exercise, though, at least established a consensus that some sort of standards are worth having. To this end, we can see an interesting illustration of the power of standards if we consider for a moment why so many of us can’t draw, or can’t paint, or can’t sing.
If you are lacking in one of these skills (or, like me, are blessed to be incompetent in all three), your lack of skill isn’t necessarily because of a lack of talent in art and music. It also isn’t because you didn’t have smart, talented art and music teachers.
The reality is that the K-12 system you experienced simply never reached agreement on standards that would have led to a methodical approach to developing these skills, one that built on a progression and spanned grades (like it did for ELA and math).
Had a consensus been reached that our art classes should have a systematic component that proceeded from basic line drawing, to shading, to perspective, and so on, and then followed a similar course for painting, and the system spanned grades, we would have developed those skills (like everything, to vary degrees).
(Of course in a time when most of us parents are just thrilled when funding for arts classes avoids the budget axe in a given year so our kids can have art at all, it is hard to imagine getting picky about the system for teaching).
The point is that what we learn and how we learn it does not just happen by accident. Even when we study a subject, the lack of a specific destination can have surprising repercussions in terms of what we master. Destinations in learning have repercussions.
Family Learning Standards
This post is about establishing our own learning destinations to address the gaps that will otherwise exist; the preceding section hopefully at least provides a very high-level sense for the role of learning standards in our kids’ K-12 educations and the impact of those standards on what is learned.
The good news is that establishing our own family learning destinations, or our family learning standards, should be far less fractious than the national effort. That is, of course, assuming the rest of the family just keeps their opinions to themselves and accepts our family learning mandates as gospel. Right?
Sorry, typing Tourettes. What I meant to type was: establishing our own family learning standards should be a fun, interesting, and enriching experience, providing an opportunity to talk about our learning visions for those future graduates and what they will know, and getting everyone’s input.
Whatever your family sees a making up those future 18-year-olds, if it is not part of K-12 and you don’t expect they are going to pick it up randomly, that topic should become a destination on the list of family learning standards.
I am going to post our Ueland family version 1.0 list in the comments below in a few days (and I welcome yours), but to give you a sense for what will be on it, our list includes topics like: business, coding, cooking, fitness, mental health, personal finance, personal productivity, religion/spirituality, and visual communication.
As suggested above, we are just adding the destinations that we aren’t confident K-12 will cover and that we believe are important to have some understanding of by graduation. Just seeing those examples likely sets your wheels spinning, but it might also help to share a quick recap of the logic of one of our additions, along with some steps that the kids could take for achieving the basic standard.
To that end, my thinking on business went something like:
For a litany of reasons, the absence of business and entrepreneurship from the K-12 agenda is in an educational omission that I officially term: crazy.
Commerce has arguably always been under-emphasized in social studies and history classes (the adage ‘follow the money’ being a powerful tool for understanding human behavior since money’s first minting, and ‘follow the gold’ being a tool before that).
In the era in which we live, business has absolutely taken center stage—to the point that learning the basics of the market and capitalism are no longer optional.
Having a foundational understanding of business also has practical ramifications in the lives of our future adult kids, given that it is where so many of the available jobs and careers reside.
There are great new ways to learn about this topic, from How I Built This podcast (a show that has taught me more than then my business admin undergrad degree), to great bios of business leaders like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and books like The Four.
In addition to learning through resources like the ones mentioned, the best way to learn is likely to do, which has never been easier in the era side hustles, and disruption-enabling businesses like Squarespace and Shopify. So, starting some side-hustle type business is a must for meeting the family standard.
Lastly, we can find internship opportunities to experience the business world too, which can be of the mini-variety, something as simple as learning about parent jobs by eavesdropping on Zoom meetings, or having lunch with our friends to learn about other careers, or landing actual internships.
Hopefully, those bullets give you a sense for the type of reasoning that can lead to what you include on your list and the steps kids can take to meet the standard.
In the case of this business example, much of what I describe is already underway at our house. By 13, my son had listened to Steve Jobs, The Four, and multiple How I Built This episodes. This is not because he is precocious or is into business at his age.
Instead, I was already committed to this standard, and he has simply consumed this great content, just as you or I might. Like us, he has found it interesting. He occasionally references things he’s learned from the content. And it is 100 percent clear that it is resulting in a far more dimensional understanding of the world than he otherwise would have, and he is well on his way to having some basic proficiency in the topic by 18.
That said, I recommend not worrying about the steps to gain proficiency initially. The most important aspect of this exercise is simply having the discussion, thinking about the future, and developing the family list.
So, start with the list, and the family discussion it hopefully engenders, and then post it somewhere in the house as a reminder. One friend and reader who I discussed this with got excited about the family learning standards replacing the rules of polite dinner table behavior that was still up in the kitchen from when his kids were little.
We can also flesh out tips for reaching these standards in the future. Not surprisingly, I have ideas for next steps, including how the list can be part of an annual family review and even how our kids could document their learning on each standard.
But that is for the future. You have a list to develop. Just having that destination will make a difference for your family, which will radically decrease the chance for a sinking feeling at graduation and thoughts of Sunday driving at graduation. And to be honest, I have a 14-year-old to go wake up. It is, as I am writing, Saturday at 11:17 a.m. 11:47! I clearly do not need to put sleep on the Ueland Family Learning Standards. The kid has the sleeping standard locked down.