By Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE
Children can only aspire to what they know exists. This goes for every child, whether they’re in a state school in Manchester or in any school in India. Aspiring to a future where they have passion and purpose is, to a very significant degree, all about children writing their own narrative of the possible, i.e., making their own decisions about their aspirations.
Families unwittingly can at times negatively impact aspiration. I saw it with my own eyes during my global research at KidZania (https://www.ft.com/content/5898ae16-153d-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c; https://www.ft.com/content/0147eed0-1608-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c). The choices made by children on family visits to KidZanias were too often influenced by parents helicoptering; children would do what the parents told them to do rather than what they might want to experience. During school visits, children had the freedom to choose for themselves. Aspiration is not found when someone tells you what to do, aspiration is found when you are inspired through experience. That is why many schools play such a vital role in building a community of aspiration, recognising that experience is everything.
Know our children
To help children achieve this, as educators, we must understand our purpose as facilitator of experience-based learning in a world where the environment is the third teacher, both online and off-line. Regardless of the other requirements that schools must deliver, our purpose as educators is to connect children to the real world and its wide horizons. Inspiration and aspiration come in connecting what has been taught in school with what can be experienced, achieved and continued beyond school. So, whether it is to support that child in Manchester or that child in China, as educators it matters how well we know that child or, as Professor Sir Tim Brighouse often used to say, know “what flavour crisps your children like”.
In many, often large schools, we don't know our children well enough and, as a result, we end up serving only percentages of cohorts. We serve the very able, and those with special educational needs, and the naughty ones. All the others – the majority – we actually don’t talk about very much. That strike me as fundamentally wrong.
Imagine a world where every child gets top grades in their exams, has 100% attendance, and is really well behaved. In the current system, how do we then distinguish between them? How will we know what’s right for them or not? The better we know our students, beyond grades, the better we can provide situations whereby they can have their own authentic experiences and begin to write their own narrative of who they are becoming, from a very early age.
As educators, we need to stop asking children what they want to do, and instead ask them who they want to be like. It is a values question. No child buys a shirt that says ‘number 7 Footballer’ on the back. They buy the shirt of the footballer they want to be. There is something in certain people inspiring a child to say to themselves “that is who I want to be like”. This is why role-models matter.
The value of role-models
I often use myself as an example of the value of role-models. Back when I was an 11-year-old boy growing up in the Netherlands, I wanted to be like my grandad because I loved him, and he was incredibly kind. I wanted to be as good as grandad, but I also wanted to play football like Johan Cruijff, and I wanted to be Christiaan Barnard because he was the first heart transplant surgeon which struck me as something wonderous. And I wanted to be Martin Luther King because I heard his voice on the wireless and I thought “I want to talk like that”. Later, I wanted to write like Christa Wolf and then I wanted to be like Mr Beurskens, my German teacher. Because of him I became a German teacher too. What drove me to these people was, quite simply, I just wanted to be like them. They were my role-models; they inspired me and gave me the aspiration to become me.