Developmental Direction

I just came back from a fourth grade performance at the school that I'll be teaching at for the next two years. It was a remarkable show with dancing, singing, expressive speech, drums, instruments, sports, art, and so many other wonderful things that had blood and sweat poured into it. Truly remarkable.
Undoubtedly a time that students will look back on with fondness in their later years.

It's weird because this is something I whole-heartedly believe in: students in the performing arts... where a sense of community from the arduous journey, as well as the opportunity to shine just fulfills a part of a child's development in life and helps them to see a different side of themselves and to understand themselves better.
While watching it, though, a nagging feeling at the back of my head kept coming back with "but what about later in their development?" "what about when they become pressured to place their life value not in the arts, but in their examination results?"
And as a result, I continued to watch with a bittersweet confidence for the impact of this performance in their lives.



The notion of complexity has been central to my thinking about education as well as about life. There is no one road to democracy, no single method for teaching reading, no pat solution to a discipline problem or a question of motvation or hope. There is no single, simple canon that represents the best of human effort, no absolutely clear list of things every child must learn to be a successful human being. I believe that children, guided and informed by self-respect, respect for others, confidence, and compassion, can find many roads to decent and rewarding adulthood, few of which we can reliably predict. In my teaching I'm as concerned with the values children take with them into the future as with the specific things they learn.