There were icebreakers near enough to help, but time was limited for both the whales and the ship crews.
“If you’re the dispatcher for the icebreakers,” Libby asked, “what do you do? Do you send them to save the ships or the whales?”
The young students called on each other, agreeing and disagreeing, specifying the reason for their opinion and building on each other’s statements. A consensus was building around the possibility of saving them both if they worked fast enough.
Libby was ready to turn up the heat. “There is one more important piece of information. The weather is worsening quickly. It’s impossible to save both the whales and the humans with these conditions. Which do you choose to save: the whales or the humans?”
The debate about the ethics of saving one over the other became more emotional but remained respectful and clear.
“There are plenty of humans in the world,” Ellie said. “Isn’t it more important to save the whales?”
“But can we just let people die?” Chris asked.
“These whales are included on the endangered species list,” Anaya said, pointing to the whiteboard.
There were thirty-six students in the group. Libby stopped the discussion and took a vote. It was a tie: Half of them wanted to save the whales, and the other half wanted to save the humans. The debate continued.
In perfect Socratic form, Libby didn’t relent. She held up her finger to signal there was more information coming.
She said, “There are 20 whales still alive in the ice and 1,000 people on the boat.”
This seemed to sway the group toward resolution, and the energy of the discussion abated.
Libby continued to turn up the heat to reignite the intensity of the conflict.
“These are the only 20 gray whales left in the world,” she said. The students leaned in. This changed everything. Then she delivered the final punch: “And your family is on the boat.”
Libby’s questions—creating a fictional moral dilemma based on a real situation—did exactly what the Socratic method aims to do: force hard choices, change minds based on analysis of information, and instill the skill of careful listening and concise, purposeful communicating.
After five more minutes of heated but clear arguments, Libby looked at the clock. In pure commitment to the Socratic rules, she knew it was time to close the discussion.
“One final vote. Please raise your hand if you’d save the humans.” She counted. “Who would save the whales?”
It was clear. The humans had won this one.
“Thank you all for your participation. We have time for two people to share why they changed their minds and any lessons learned from the discussion.” With a small smile of satisfaction, she closed the group right on time. The students stood up, giving her a round of applause. She had led them through rough intellectual and emotional territory with an air of professional elegance. They, too, were satisfied. All dispersed to their desks to begin their independent work time.
Libby was nine years old at the time. There was not a teacher in the room as she facilitated the discussion, nor did an adult choose the topic, advise her, collect the research, or write the questions. The ages of the children in the circle ranged from six to ten years old.
· · ·
On most days, Acton Academy functions like a well-ordered society, as well-run as any small town in America with a functioning government, laws, and a finely tuned economy, with each person contributing a special gift or skill.
On other days, the leaders don’t rise up, and small distractions descend into chaos. These days include moments of gut-wrenching frustration as we adults have to force ourselves to step back more than once—and maybe more than twice—to let the children solve their own problems.
I didn’t start with a natural inclination to step back when my children were having a problem to let them figure it out on their own. You practically had to chain me down to stop me from running out to tie their shoes so they wouldn’t trip, or rush home to get their backpacks when they forgot them, or tell the mean kid on the playground to be nice to my child.
I did not fully understand the leap I would have to make in my own mind and heart to trust the children to handle struggles and even suffer in order to grow into highly functioning, intelligent, and kind humans. It would be a full decade before the urgency of this lesson would hit home.
And it all began with a seemingly innocuous conversation with a teacher in the hallway of one of the top traditional private schools in Austin, Texas.
Chapter 2
A Call to Action
“Sheila and I are blessed that you and Jeff took the initiative to start this excellent learning environment. We could not imagine a better place to equip our children for the future.”
—Herb and Sheila Singh, Acton Academy parents
Like every Tuesday afternoon back in 2007, Jeff, in his dark blue suit and red tie, picked up Taite, our oldest child (whom we shared with her mother), drove home, and walked across the gravel driveway to our house. Taite, ten years old, spunky, and engaging, skipped behind him, her school uniform disheveled from the day. As Jeff got closer, I could see something dark in his expression. He was usually excited to spend treasured time with Taite; something was wrong.
“We’re not doing this anymore,” he said quietly.
“Not doing what?” I asked, just as five-year-old Charlie and four-year-old Sam pushed past us out the kitchen door to get to Taite, their favorite person on earth. It was a gorgeous April afternoon and the green grass beckoned. The children ran off into the yard, our three dogs barking wildly behind them. Jeff and I slumped onto the porch steps together, and I waited for him to continue.
“We’re not doing this school thing anymore,” he said. He watched the kids play.
I wasn’t sure where this was coming from. Taite was happy in her traditional elementary school, and the boys were in a fine Montessori school; they were still too young for elementary school, but we had started thinking about where we should enroll them.
Jeff explained.
When he picked up Taite, he dropped in to talk with her math teacher. He told him we were looking at more mainstream options for Sam and Charlie, who up to that point had, in their Montessori school, choices about what to work on during the day and lots of opportunity for movement.
Jeff asked, “How soon should we move them to a more traditional school?”
The teacher said, “As soon as possible.”
Jeff asked why, and the teacher said, “Once they’ve had that much freedom, they’ll hate being chained to a desk and being talked to all day.”
Jeff couldn’t help himself. “I wouldn’t blame them!”
The teacher looked down at the floor, and Jeff was worried he’d offended him. When he looked up, there were tears in the teacher’s eyes.
This teacher, known as the best teacher in the school, said, “I wouldn’t either.”
Jeff turned and looked at me. “Laura, I’m done,” he said. “Charlie and Sam can learn without being trapped at a desk all day. We have to find another alternative. We’ve talked about how much the world has changed since we went to school. We need to either homeschool or create our own school.”
We’d chosen a Montessori program for the boys because we’d studied Maria Montessori’s work and believed in the science behind her design of giving children choices in their work, along with clear boundaries. But our school didn’t have an upper-elementary program, so we knew we’d need to make a change one day soon. Sadly, our options all looked pretty much the same, just like what we ourselves had gone through in our schooling. But the world was so different now with smart phones, the Human Genome Project, and Google, for starters. What would learning in the twenty-first century look like if you started with a blank sheet of paper?
We were hearing a call to action—t
he starting point of every Hero’s Journey since the beginning of time.
Looking back to look forward
Jeff and I weren’t sure what the future of learning would look like, but we had a roadmap of what worked in the past. America hasn’t always had a mega-education industry. In fact, it all started with integrated one-room schoolhouses and practical apprenticeships. By the late nineteenth century, the United States had become the strongest country on earth without a centralized education system. Reading, writing, and math were delivered in one-room schoolhouses, where children of all ages largely learned from each other. The great hero stories of the world—education through character-driven allegory—were pillars, as were the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger stories that made individual effort part of our American DNA. Only a few of the elite went to college, to study law or join the clergy. Young people learned to do something that mattered in a master–apprentice system. Learning to know—acquiring rote knowledge, which was repeated and memorized—was valued, especially because books were expensive and hard to come by. But learning to do and learning to be were also valued. Together, competence and character mattered more than simply knowledge. In the complex evolution and growth of public and private schools in our country, more and more standardization of content necessitated, relying on tests to prove learning and categorize children based on test scores. We wondered if it might be possible to retrieve what had been lost in the process.
The opportunity fascinated us. Having learned the Socratic method during his time at Harvard Business School, Jeff had been teaching with it at the graduate level. I had studied cognition and learning to receive my master’s in education from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. It had always been in my heart to become a public school teacher. We were enthralled with learning about the history of education and excited by the explosion of technology. With digital libraries and online courses readily available and inexpensive, we could bring every great lecturer, expert, and teacher right into the room. At the same time, using innovative education games—or “gamification”—was erupting around us and was clearly here to stay. This meant technology and education experts were integrating game mechanics with curriculum content to make learning more engaging and fun. In SimCity, for example, children learn the basics of civil engineering and how to think like a mayor to understand city planning. We saw endless opportunities to transform what “curriculum” looked like and make the learning experience as captivating as a game—one that feels almost addictive, focusing your attention so that time seems to disappear.
We took a deep breath and decided to cross the threshold into unknown territory.
Glimpsing a new vision of learning
We knew we were going to veer off the traditional track for our children’s schooling but had no clear idea what this new path would look like. Jeff, who had been ranked by BusinessWeek and The Economist as one of the top entrepreneurship professors in the country while teaching at the University of Texas, founded the Acton School of Business, naming this specialized MBA program after the Victorian scholar and philosopher, Lord John D. Acton.
Lord Acton’s writings about liberty and learning served the entrepreneurship mission well. Acton famously wrote, “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton’s deepest work was focused on the relationship between liberty and morality. He envisioned a community that is free and virtuous. His principles included striving for excellence and giving unselfishly for the good of the community.
We, too, envisioned a community for the youngest learners—as young as five and six years old—that would be bound by principles of freedom, excellence, and moral goodness. The Acton name helped us take our dreams from lofty ideals to concrete truths.
What’s in a name?
Calling ourselves “Acton Academy” quickly forced the delineation of our own core values and principles of learning. We decided to cobble together what we knew would work with what we thought would work and experiment with it. If it didn’t work, we’d try something different.
Some of our best ideas came from our children, gathered around the dinner table. One night as we dug into tacos and shared our personal highs and lows from the day, Sam lit up. “Let’s do a fair! Like a science one but with businesses.”
This sounded interesting. Since having the inkling to start our own school, we’d been giving Charlie, Taite, and Sam some big projects at home to help us understand how they learn, what hooked them, and what resources we could draw from. One of these home projects was entrepreneurship, Jeff’s area of expertise. They’d been practicing with variations of lemonade stands on our street corner, learning the difference between profit and revenue and how to make operational decisions through an online game called “Robo Rush.” This game was created for graduate-level students, yet our young children were playing it and learning from it. This surprised and enlightened us.
Our dinner conversation had moved from sharing how our days went to focusing on this question: “How can you prove you’ve learned something without taking a test?”
“You just do it,” Taite said. Her words had sparked Sam’s idea of a fair. With it fresh on the table, Jeff and I started rattling off names we thought would be catchy. How about the Young Entrepreneurs Expo? The Entrepreneurship Exhibition?
Charlie jumped in. “Just call it what it is. It’s a Children’s Business Fair.”
So clear. So simple. He was exactly right. With that, we decided to host a Children’s Business Fair in our yard. We’d create flyers, make a simple website, and invite other children to join in the fun.
After dinner, Jeff and I realized something obvious but often overlooked when it comes to education. We must involve the children in decision making about their learning experiences. They can be trusted to be creative and direct. Their participation inspires a feeling of ownership and pride. Plus, they have amazing ideas—much better than ours.
Thus began our claiming of core values for “Acton Academy.”
First, trust the children
It is a truth that the Founding Fathers knew—that children need guardrails, mentors, and legitimate authority, and they could be trusted with far more responsibility than most school administrators today could imagine. At least as we had experienced it.
Such trusting of children came easily to Jeff and me. I learned it from my parents, who moved my family from coast to coast and in between during my childhood. My father, a renowned pastor, and my mother, a beloved science teacher, knew the best learning came through being free to explore the world, holding real jobs at an early age, and asking deep questions of mentors. They trusted my three sisters and me from a very early age.
Jeff learned the same lessons by listening to Sugata Mitra share his stories and research about children teaching themselves when left alone, without adult intervention.
This simple idea of trusting the children with freedom and responsibility would become the secret ingredient for Acton Academy.
Then, let them struggle
It’s much easier to think objectively about letting children struggle to solve their own problems than to carry out those thoughts with my own hands and feet as a mother. When I see my children hurting, my maternal instincts can get warped, and I swoop in to fix things for them—even when I know they can do it themselves.
On an intellectual level, Jeff and I knew struggling was valuable in terms of real learning and growth. Our new school culture needed to embrace the importance of learning from failure—not avoiding it. Ours would not be a “trophy for everyone” environment. But could we find parents who would let their children struggle, fail, even suffer in order to grow? Could I be that kind of parent?
Madeline Levine wrote in The Price of Privilege, “Parents who persistently fall on the side of intervening for their child, as opposed to supporting their child’s attempts to problem-solve, interfere with the most important task of childhood
and adolescence: the development of a sense of self.”
How could I possibly ask other parents to step back if I couldn’t do it myself? This truth would need to become part of my daily life as a mom so I could better support others who would join Acton Academy.
And always, seize the adventure
Questions, curiosity, trust, struggle—these are the ultimate traits of a real adventure. As the pieces to our puzzle lined up, we realized Acton Academy was more a quest to discover one’s greatest gifts and the grand wonders of the world than a “school.” This led us to pursue a deeper understanding of the Hero’s Journey.
Since the dawn of human civilization, the great myth affirming life as an adventure of self-discovery has struck souls of all ages. Joseph Campbell’s work brought the truth behind this narrative to life. George Lucas and Disney have used it well. From Star Wars to The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, their stories hinge on the truth that even young children are drawn to transformative questions:
Am I really a match for this task?
Can I overcome the dangers?
Who are my friends?
Do I have the courage and the capacity for the challenge before me?
Each of us is just an ordinary person; but if we’re willing to say yes to new experiences and keep moving forward, even when it’s hard, it hurts, and it includes failure, then we are—all of us—heroes on a journey.
Our decision was made. Acton Academy would be an invitation to a real-life Hero’s Journey. The courage to say yes to the journey would be the starting point for each child and parent.
Gathering a solid foundation of mentors
During the months that followed, Jeff and I sought out heroes in education. We hoped our research into these heroes would help us gain deeper insights into what did and didn’t work in children’s education.
Courage to Grow Page 3