Education is not a diploma that you can get and forget, but the constant improvement of skills. For adults, successful people, continuing education helps to broaden their horizons and restart relationships with children.
“I really need to talk to you, because you work in education, and we have problems with …”, and then options follow: “son / daughter cannot choose a university”, “dropped out of university”, “does not want to enter at all” and finally my favorite is “he/she is already 16 and he/she doesn’t know what he/she wants to be”. A wave of panic overwhelms parents, especially managers, and first of all top managers.
Their children, having reached the age of 17-18, do not want to follow the trajectory determined by their families, or even run away from universities. They want to be cooks and cook crabs in a trendy food court, work as fitness instructors, code games for Mail.ru. And sometimes they don’t even know what they want.
My son, who himself chose the Timiryazev Academy for admission – studied textbooks and watched lectures at night, just a couple of months ago took an academic leave with a brief wording: “It seems that this is not mine.” Over the course of a year, he realized that studying at an “old-mode” university, even in a desired specialty, is difficult – too strong a contrast with a normal school and internships in Europe, where you were treated like a normal adult.
Coming to terms with the classic approach of the old academy is not easy.
Let’s just say that this situation was quite difficult for our family to accept. Are years of effort, and often parental efforts, thrown away in vain? How to look into the eyes of friends? What if the army? What if education doesn’t work out? What about a career? Of course, we read columns of famous psychologists, discuss Harari’s books and are convinced that everything will be different for our children in the future. But it’s one thing to repost smart thoughts on Facebook and it’s quite another to experience it all in reality.
I was lucky: several factors coincided in our situation, which helped me build a dialogue with my son and think about where our projections of children’s happiness end and their life begins.
We find it difficult to let go of control (or the illusion of control) over a situation. We are used to making decisions, strategizing and thinking we know exactly how and when. We consider ourselves smart enough, intelligent and advanced parents, able to take care of everything, give our children the maximum opportunities and the best possible: education, travel to different countries, entertainment and games – something that we often did not have ourselves. Moreover, it seems that everything is fine – there are no open conflicts, no loud quarrels, demonstrative slamming of doors and leaving the house. I often see young people who finish their studies with difficulty so as not to upset their parents. But then for years they cannot find themselves in the specialty.
Ask yourself the question: do we give children the opportunity to decide something for themselves? And an even more difficult question: do we let them take care of us? Do we give them the right to look for themselves in other scenarios, the right to make a mistake, after all?
One of the main rules on an airplane in an emergency is that to help your child, you must first help yourself.
It helped me that I am now studying myself. Moreover, at the same time on two programs – LIFT (Leadership Identity Foundation and Transformation) of the native business school and the creative leadership program at the THNK Amsterdam school.
Both programs are not about pure knowledge. In short, their task is to teach us to act differently. This, it seems to me, is the key difference between the new types of education. What I received on these programs helped me launch a completely different mechanism for communicating with my son and family. Talk no more about how the son needs to live and what to do, but about how, for example, to comprehend what is happening around. Trying to understand what we are doing and why, what went wrong as expected is very useful, it also helps to overcome the barriers of the parent-child relationship and talk like interesting conversationalists to each other.
And, finally, the very fact that parents learn that it is normal to admit that you are not good at something and sit down at a desk is a serious incentive for children.
Education in the modern world is a key tool for development, but bachelor’s and master’s degrees are not a choice for life. Before investing a lot of money in studying at prestigious universities, think about the concept of continuing education. Do not try to predict what you want to do in 20 years, but determine for yourself what you want to do now. And apply the same approach to your own children.