Most school leaders I speak to want their students to leave school with the confidence to do something useful in the world. The same leaders, often in the same conversation, are also worried about results, behaviour, the basics not slipping.
There's usually an assumption underneath that worry. The idea that one of these things has to give. That if you really make space for student voice and student passion, you've had to soften the rules to do it. Schools like Green School Bali get to grow young changemakers, the thinking goes, because the rules apply differently there.
I asked Melati Wijsen about this on the podcast this week. She started Bye Bye Plastic Bags at 12, spoke at the UN as a teenager, never went to university, and now teaches at three universities and runs YOUTHTOPIA. If anyone has earned the right to argue for loosening the reins, it's her.
She didn't.
I asked what her teachers got most right. I expected her to talk about the freedom, the 50 days she barely spent on campus in her final year, the way her UN trips counted as science credits. Instead she said the best thing her teachers did was hold her accountable. They didn't give her brownie points for the activism. An essay wasn't going to cover a fortnight off school for the IPCC. She had to do the science and the maths on top of the changemaking. Looking back at 25, she said this is one of the things she's most grateful for.
The freedom was real and so was the bar. Neither one was the price of the other.
That's the bit I keep turning over. We tend to frame this as a trade-off between rigour and curiosity, and Melati's teachers seem to have just refused the trade. They believed in what she was doing and they wouldn't let her use it as a reason to drop the rest. What surprised me most was that she said it felt like respect.
If you've got a passionate 14-year-old in your school right now, I'd love to know what they're being held to, and whether they'd describe the bar the way Melati does.
Hit reply and let me know. Always good to hear what's actually going on in your school.
Shane
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