It’s not easy being a kid today. They face shifting curricula requirements, a strong focus on standardized test results, piles of homework, and a seemingly never-ending quest for achievement in everything from academics to sports. A recent documentary, Race to Nowhere delves into the rigors and risks of growing up in the 2010s.
Former elementary and high school teacher Tony Wagner says he is worried this concern with business and benchmarking is stripping children of their creative nature.
Wagner is an innovation education fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University, and founding executive director of Engaging Schools, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, nonprofit that helps schools inspire enthusiasm for learning in students. He says a narrow definition of what it means to be a successful student–including too much emphasis on teaching for standardized tests–is creating a situation where children will have difficulty being innovators later in life.
The research for Wagner’s bestselling book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who will Change the World, has revealed some troubling dynamics.
“The average child asks 100 questions a day,” he says. “But by the time a child is 10 or 12, he or she has figured out that it’s much more important to get right answers than to keep asking thoughtful questions.”
How do we support these creative finger painters in ways that will help them succeed as innovators later in life? Cultivating these five key principles is an excellent place to start.
1. Play
Wagner says a child’s innovative framework is strengthened when teachers bring a sense of play to the curriculum; taking offbeat approaches and making whimsical connections to the course material, he says.