PlayWorx: Skills for Life
Preparing our children for more than exams
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
~ Pablo Picasso
I re-purposed the title of my debutante blog post from a recent essay by Nesta, a global innovation foundation that backs “new ideas to tackle the big challenges of our time, from the pressures of an ageing population to stretched public services and a fast changing jobs market”. The essay contends that following the release of exam results and young people leaving school gates behind, they need to be armed with much more than grades.
While it notes that many schools in the UK “are doing fantastic work to support the broader skills, well being and abilities of their students”, it also concedes that under high-pressure accountability school systems around the world, which sadly are increasingly the norm, where “schools, teachers and individual students are all judged on success in high-stakes examinations — from the age of five through to 18”, “these wider skills are often the added extras”. (Fortunately in Ireland high-stakes exams are still contained to the latter end of that age spectrum, with the terminal secondary school exams — the Leaving Cert).
The essay reaches the conclusion that we [society] cannot just “assume that students will just pick these [wider skills and capabilities] up as an unintentional byproduct of the current curriculum: that somehow they will just ‘rub off’ on young people”.
As a parent of 3 school-age children, I couldn’t agree more with the Nesta essay. I have been involved in education in one shape or another all my life. Obviously like most people, I went through the formal school system. But I was also raised by a mother who was a primary school teacher, getting involved in assessing and grading her pupils’ work and assisting her in the school library. Most recently, over the past five years I have been active in the ‘front line’ of sorts — involved in the parents’ association and management board of the school our children go to, as well as representing the school within the National Parents’ Council, the representative body for parents of children in primary or early education in Ireland.
Those vantage positions have given me the opportunities to contribute in a little way to the education of young people in my community. But they have also allowed me observe and reflect on how we educate our young and prepare them for the future — a future that is actively being shaped at a tremendous rate and that on all accounts will be markedly different from the world of today — the world in which we parents of today grew up.
Our first child is now in his last year of primary school, on the cusp of entering secondary school. As we prepare him for that transition, we are also equipping him for a path that doesn’t lead through the formal school track. Our son has had an unshakable fascination for cars pretty much all his life. This interest has encompassed various toy cars (perhaps similarly as a lot of boys) and a most-cherished truck which we unfortunately lost on a train journey when he was a toddler — he kept pushing it up and down the aisle all the way to and from Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, but on the final leg of the journey, tired, he drifted off to sleep, his truck rolling away from him down the carriage never to be seen again. An early first lesson in loss.
Never mind, as this fascination was soon transferred to other items in successive sequence — Disney’s Lightning McQueen cartoons, Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii, a massive and growing collection of model cars. This has culminated in the last year, since I introduced him to Formula 1 racing, to an ambition to become a professional race car driver. His idols are Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen. In contrast, mine at his age were Enid Blyton, of the Famous Five and Secret Seven fame, and Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels — novelists and poets, underlining my own fascination with the power and poetry of words.
Our son is what I would describe as a Dominant Singular Passion Personality — essentially someone who has one overriding passion. In pursuit of that overriding passion to become a Formula 1 race car driver, even though we have a diverse library of video console games, he plays nothing but racing simulation games on their Sony PlayStation 4, games such as Gran Turismo, F1 and Project Cars 2. At arcades, same — only plays racing games. He’s always asking to go go-karting. He has a subscription to Car and Driver magazine. And in keeping with being of a generation of digital natives, he has set up his own YouTube channel and for a time last year, was waking up at graveyard hours — 4am! — to hone his craft — racing and video content creation.
He’s now been competing consistently in multiplayer online races, steadily climbing the ranking ladder. Recently he applied to and joined an online racing crew, where’s already he’s become a race scheduler for the team.
This may all seem fantastical and incredible, but it’s not really. Most of us growing up had similarly strong passions — 80’s music, movies, fashion, maths (I see scrunched up faces :?). But the act of growing up implicitly appears also to have included growing out of these early passions. Whether from parents or older people involved in our upbringing, the academic pressures of schooling, or just generally accepted societal norms, we are ‘encouraged’ to ‘grow up’, ‘wake up’, ‘smell the coffee’, ‘get real’ — you take your pick. And as we advanced along the path of life, bit-by-little-bit, like the breadcrumbs in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, imperceptibly we dropped intrinsic parts of our inner being along the way. For some of us, sometime later in life we wake up to these damage we have done to our inner child, and sometimes we have the time, resources and opportunity to recover it. But for some others, the realization comes too late or, even worse, not at all, and they live less full lives than they were intended to. (Grammar police stay clear!)
The essential thrust of PlayWorx is to sustain that inner child in our 3 children, to help them delineate, develop and progressively express the unique groove patterns of their inner core — to discover their passions, their interests and their talents, to wrap capabilities and skills around those, and to give expression to them, first in fealty to those gifts they have been endowed with, but also in service to their communities and to their world. To enable them flower and blossom into bold, authentic, explosive bursts of full-layered Technicolor, 3D Dolby surround sound, gritty tactile textures, scrumptious unsublimated tastes, evocative aromatic smells…to go from unique potentials to unique achievements…to morph from sallow green juvenile caterpillars to iridescent green Emerald Swallowtail butterflies, exhibiting light-refracting blue and yellow reflections, black with orange undersides, white and blue spots along hind wings edges, sheathed in a generous array of green scales with a background colour alternating from dark green to black, and an ample collection of bright emerald green metallic almost V-shaped bands.
As PlayWorx Studios, we have restructured our family environment and child rearing practices to emphasize imagination first. It entails such elements as teaching our children magic as a means to foster wonder and sustain their sense of curiosity; constructing optical illusions to totally warp their perspectives and cultivate enigmatic personas; learning papercraft as a rudimentary form to inculcate the principles and practices of craftsmanship; and poetry as a process to play with words in free association, as opposed to the rigid strictures of grammar, and to learn to distill their ideas and thoughts into beautiful, human-shaped forms.
In this weekly blog, I aim to share my ruminations, musings and reflections, my parenting philosophy and practices as we prepare our children for life beyond the school gates, the joys and hopes of equipping them with the broader skills that will underpin their pursuit of their self-determined passions, and the challenges of developing and implementing an extra-curricular path in parallel with their formal schooling.
I invite you to take a front-row seat into our family life as we put this imagination and creativity first approach to raising our children. I will share my thought processes, my extensive research, the challenges along the way, the highs and lows, but also celebrate the victories along the way, minor and major. Join me on this adventure as I unfurl a fresh take on child rearing and the development of human potential. You can subscribe to this weekly blog. Or if you prefer, follow me on Facebook where I will re-share the blog posts. And if you prefer an even more intimate experience, follow me also on Instagram where I will share more frequently, the woofs and wefts of this adventure.
[This article was originally published, in its entirety, as a post on my personal blog.]
Update (25 Sep 2021): PlayWorx is currently on sabbatical.
At present, I am blogging exclusively at The Global Careerist.
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If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
I champion parents of t(w)eens to become intentional in nurturing them as Imagineers, enabling them engineer their imaginative and creative ideas into productive and practical forms, thus empowering them to masterfully navigate and thrive in an Age of Massive Disruption.
I do this by writing a Medium publication, speaking at events and cooking up ingenious ways to spread the PlayWorx Method message of emphasizing nurturing of bold imagination and building of sustained creative capital during the t(w)eens years.
If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
