Malcolm GauldDuring last month’s Spring Family Weekend I had the opportunity to offer some words of welcome to Hyde’s parents. Since we have always put character first at Hyde, I kicked off with my personal definition of the word:
I went on to explain that most of the character programs I’ve seen over the years have been heavy on “guardian” and too light on “capapult.” They tend to be curative as opposed to inspiring or preventative.
Then I hit them with some Jonathan Haidt (author of the awesome new book The Anxious Generation and co-author of the 2018 must-read The Coddling of the American Mind):
Staying in the Haidt lane, I got into some of his thinking and research that has led him to concude that there are two reasons today’s kids are so anxious. The first one, “safetyism,” began in the 1980s and continues today. It’s a parental mindset that finds parents overly engaged in nearly every aspect of their children’s development. As a result, too many children are not learning how to assess and manage physical risk on the playground and are not reaping the essential social and emotional skills that can only be learned from unsupervised play.
The second reason has to do with too many young people — i.e., young teens and younger — being given smart phones. Calling it the largest completely unsupervised global generational experiment ever conducted, Haidt is mystified by a set of parental norms that would result in a parent taking great pains to restrict their children from walking freely around their own neighborhood while thinking nothing of sending them to their room where they can then travel to some pretty scary places on the internet. He concludes that childhood across the globe has transitioned from a play-based phenomenon to a phone-based daily existence. And, what’s more, parents have been completely complicit throughout.
From there, I wrapped it up with a brief statement from Scott Peck’s 1989 classic The Road Less Traveled. (Fun Fact: In the late 1980s, students and teachers at Hyde read the book as a schoolwide project. The kids called it “The Book Less Read.” You can always count on Hyde kids to put a memorable spin on all schoolwide endeavors!)
For years, I used to carry around copies of this opening passage from the book in my wallet…
… ending with “… once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.” Whenever I encountered a student having a particularly hard time, I’d slip them a copy.
Might be time to pull that practice out of my pedagogic moth balls.
Onward, Malcolm Gauld
