How important is school?
By James Olsen, Ph.D. May 23, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

The question of how important school is to success in life is an interesting one. Enough educational longitudinal studies over t10- and 20-year time periods have now been carried out on the population and we have some interesting answers. Here are some of the conclusions, which may surprise you (or at least I found them so.) 

Academic success can be clearly helpful in some situations but other qualities like leadership, interpersonal skills and personal confidence can be even more important than success in school. While being smart is helpful, there are lots and lots of smart people who are not successful either in their personal or professional lives. 

People skills are central today because lots of activities, particularly in business, require teamwork and cooperation. Research problems like finding a cure for cancer or AIDs are so complex that they require interdisciplinary effort on the part of many people from different fields of study who work together in concert on different aspects of the same problem.

Is there much difference in academic achievement among people educated in a traditional school in comparison to a progressive one? Of course, I already knew the answer to that one. People educated in progressive schools would of course be better 

prepared. Wrong. Researchers could find no significant differences in academic achievement between the two groups. It didn’t really matter!

What were the differences? There was one outstanding variable, which was interesting to me. People who had been schooled in progressive schools showed qualities of leadership that were far greater than those from more traditional ones. I thought back to the old and famous satiric New Yorker cartoon showing a little kid standing in front of his schoolmates asking the teacher, “What are we going to do today?”

This was, I thought, an unfair characterization of progressive education but when I thought about it I thought of that leadership variable. A lot of children would never have the temerity, the leadership and the courage to ask that question of their teacher. Kids are used to taking orders in school, not asking questions. How many times have I heard a parent say to a child, “Why didn’t you ask the teacher? Why didn’t you tell the teacher you were having trouble?” 

Why don’t class members warn the teacher that when there is someone in their midst so disturbed that he is verbally threatening the lives of their classmates? Why don’t we ask more probing questions of our politicians? Why didn’t the 30,000 Enron employees tell the executives they really didn’t understand the company’s financial statements? They lost their jobs, their pensions, their health insurance, the chance to send their kids to college and for many, their self-dignity. 

It took a young female journalist to do that and then say she really didn’t understand the statements. Maybe she graduated from a progressive school. But then again… .

The Olsens have worked in the field of education for 95 collective years. They can be contacted at 154-4374 or email sml 154-4374@prodigy.net.mx.