image from www.racetonowhere.com
Kudos to you, Sara, for hosting the upcoming screening of the film Race to Nowhere! Let’s start with the obvious question – what made Cold Spring School want to hold a public viewing of this film (a free screening, I might add!)?
Thanks, Kim. We appreciate your interest in the film and thank you for featuring the event here at kidHaven.
Cold Spring was founded by parents who were eager to create a school that stimulated their kids and nurtured their love of learning. As a progressive school we have always been interested in the best practices in education and the important role that a great school can play in a community. This film caught the interest of a number of Cold Spring School community members– teachers, administrators, and parents—who had been hearing and reading about the “Race to Nowhere” in the fall. We felt strongly that the conversations being generated by “Race to Nowhere” about childhood, education, kids’ health, parenting, etc., were important and we wanted to participate. We decided to sponsor the screening as a free, community-wide event because we wanted to enable many voices to be included in the conversation, hoping that both current Cold Spring families and folks from the wider-community will join us.
I have not yet seen Race to Nowhere, but am really looking forward to attending this event next week – as a teacher, but mostly as a parent because this film addresses the heavy pressures and expectations to perform that our children face in schools today. Let me tell you, schooling has become a much more complicated issue for me to sort out now that my own children will soon become part of the “system.” Why do you think parents should see this film?
Parents should see the film because it stimulates conversations that are well worth having. We all bear a collective responsibility for how we want our kids to develop and what kind of society we want to be, what kind of world we want them to grow up into. How children are schooled and what they learn both academically and socially must be a continuous focus for us.
Do we want our children to achieve success for our pride or for their own benefit? Does their success contribute to a healthy sense of who they are and what they are capable of or is the success meant to provide a sense of identity without which they don’t know who they really are?
Race to Nowhere is rooted in the idea that education has become a “high-stakes, high-pressure culture.” I’m wondering, how do you think we got here?
The truth is that in many ways I see our general society as “high-stakes, high-pressure.” We are an ambitious society conscious of the dream of success and anxious about failing to achieve that success. People have come to the United States for generations to take advantage of opportunities denied them in their homelands. I think as a society we have focused so much on material success and the work entailed in achieving that success that we may have lost sight of what it means to live a good, healthy life, as a member of a caring community, feeling valued and contributing to the welfare of the community. At Cold Spring our social curriculum, in which we deliberately teach our kids both how to take responsibility for their own learning AND how to be caring, productive members of a group, is equally important as our academic curriculum, the “content” that our general education system is so obsessed with testing.
Everything I’ve read about Race to Nowhere suggests that, culturally, we have pushed the notion of “success” to an extreme. How do you believe parents can help their children strike a healthier balance of achievement with personal fulfillment and meaning?
It seems that many parents I know are actively trying to achieve a balance between providing meaningful and fulfilling activities and experiences for their kids, like music and sports, and letting them still have a childhood, in which they are free to explore, create, get bored and figure out how to entertain themselves. This is a tough balance to achieve and seems harder now that every activity we sign our kids up for seems to be so intensive. In my own family, we try to limit our extracurricular activities to one a season but we feel the pull to expose our kids to more. How will they know what they are passionate about if they don’t get to try it? And suddenly the calendar is filled and everyone is feeling crazed from all the running around!
I think one important solution that you will hear all early childhood experts suggest is that non-structured time is so important for kids: letting them play and work out their relationship to the world around them; letting them be creative and inventive instead of always providing structured activities. Another way is to examine why we do what we do. Do we want our children to achieve success for our pride or for their own benefit? Does their success contribute to a healthy sense of who they are and what they are capable of or is the success meant to provide a sense of identity without which they don’t know who they really are?
image from www.racetonowhere.com
I have many friends and colleagues who are currently working or previously worked in under-served and high-risk schools who have been frustrated by the implementation of No Child Left Behind. The truth is that No Child Left Behind was created in response to a great need as public policy should. Who can argue that there should be more accountability in our schools? But just how do we measure accountability? This gets really sticky. The idea that a child should lose out on recess time in order to practice test-taking skills goes against everything that we know about early childhood development.
I think it is essential that we shift away from the idea that how much someone knows is more important than how deeply someone knows something and what that person does with that knowledge. We have to accept that we are living in an age of information saturation. Our kids have so much information at their disposal the question is no longer do you know a complete set of facts about a proscribed set of subjects, but do you know how to be a nimble, critical thinker with the necessary skills to learn in an increasingly evolving world. This is why at Cold Spring we focus on the process more than the product, skills more than content.
So here’s the big question, Sara. What do you think “education” should look like?
Oh, Kim– I, like you, am a parent and an educator. I also happen to be the Director of Admissions at Cold Spring School! I recognize that this role makes my answer seem like ‘the party line,’ but I can say with real honesty that I could not imagine a school that I would want my children to attend more than where they are now. My boys literally run to the school building each morning because they are so excited to get to school. Their classrooms are places where their voices are heard and valued, where they get to explore topics of high interest, and where such exploration and discovery is continually encouraged. Even as second graders, they don’t yet know about grades (Cold Spring doesn’t give grades). They don’t work for an external reward but remain the ever-curious learners that we see most young children to be. They also know they are safe and cared for because so much attention is paid to how children treat one another and solve problems together.
image from www.racetonowhere.com
Finally, in reading the Director’s notes, I’m struck at this mom-turned-filmmaker’s call to action that “We cannot keep silent any longer. If I don’t speak out and share these stories, who will? And if not now, when?” What positive change do you hope to see come out of this film? What change can you envision on a local front?
The biggest thing that I would love to see come from people’s viewing and discussion of “Race to Nowhere,” is that we as a society reexamine our definitions of achievement and success. On a ‘smaller’ scale, I’d hope to see schools and teachers begin to examine the homework issue– why they give the homework they give in the amount that they give it and whether or not this is truly helping students. Also, it would be great to see families take on the issue of over-scheduling our kids outside of school and find ways to balance structured activities with some real downtime that we all need. Finally, Kim, you’ve asked some hard and important questions. These are the kinds of questions I hope people ask after watching “Race to Nowhere” and take the time to explore the answers together.
Agreed! Thanks so much for Chit Chatting with me, Sara! I’m really looking forward to seeing this film next week.
Here are some details for this free, community-wide event, folks. For the specifics, follow this link:
Race to Nowhere film screening
Wed, Feb 16 @ 7 pm *new date
700 Hartford Turnpike in Hamden
