Desk Job

This is another 'oldie but goodie' that I wrote some years back. It explains a lot about the idea of why allowing children to choose their learning paths & create their own schedules really works. Since I decided to get back to writing in this blog regularly, and I have a sleeping baby on my chest, I thought copying an old article today would be a good idea. So here you go!

Desk Job

Imagine, for a moment that you have a desk job. Some of you may have to do more imagining that others, but we’ve all got enough of an idea of what that would look like for this exercise. Let’s pretend you have some sort of management/sales position. Your job is to sell stuff, while leading a sales team and reporting to upper management. You can pick the kind of company – imagine yourself selling chocolate or shoes or cars or whatever makes you happy.

Alright. It’s 8am, and you report to your desk. An alarm goes off on your computer, telling you to read and return emails. You open up your email program, and get to work. Lots of messages today – some from customers, others from your sales team, still more from corporate headquarters. You dive into a few, and are in the middle of composing a response to your boss about a presentation you are to make when your email program shuts down. A new alarm is now beeping to you, and you are to stop writing emails immediately and check your voicemail.

Hmm, you think to yourself, that was important to me. But, I guess I need to get to those voicemails now, and I’ll finish the emails later. You pick up your phone. You have one message, which you quickly listen to. Three minutes later, you have finished speaking with the person who left the message. However, according to the alarm system on your computer, you must spend the next 11 minutes making phone calls. You call two customers and leave messages (it’s really too early to reach the people you need to reach), and then you notice you have 7 minutes left before you are allowed to move on to another task. You look at your list of approved activities (those you are allowed to do when you have finished your current tasks), and find they are all useless to you in terms of your actual job. You choose the least ridiculous one, and spend 6.5 minutes playing solitaire until the next alarm beeps. It is now 8:30.

Finally you hear that familiar sound. You look at the new alarm – “Work on presentation.” This makes your stomach turn. Tomorrow you will be giving a big presentation to the entire upper management team in your office. When you were given this task, you were excited – visions of colorful graphs and applause from your superiors danced through your head. Unfortunately, the system of alarms by which your day is dictated has left you unprepared for the big day. You know that you will be finishing this up tonight at home, and your children and spouse aren’t going to be happy about that. Still, you dig in, creating another few slides in your power-point presentation, and hoping that the research you have managed is adequate. Ninety minutes later another bell goes off, and you groan. You are still only about ¾ of the way complete with this task, and you will not be allowed to work on it again today.

It’s 10am now, and the new alarm tells you to “attend sales meeting.” Diligently, you grab a folder of papers and head for the boardroom. Your sales team has arrived, and you spend the next 55 minutes updating one another on the status of various customers. When the next bell rings at 11:00, one of your team members is in the middle of talking about an important client. It doesn’t matter – you cut him off and leave the room. You are now heading to lunch, even though you aren’t hungry yet.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made enough of a point. Obviously, this kind of scenario is 1) ridiculous, and 2) unworkable. No sales manager would allow his or time to be scheduled in this way, nor would they do well at their job if they did! In the real world of business, managing one’s time well is an essential skill. You need to know how much time to give to various elements of your job, and while of course there are always schedules to follow – meetings with clients or co-workers need to happen at specific times – flexibility must be given where needed. Certainly you won’t find a good business person playing solitaire because they aren’t allowed to work on more important tasks. Apply all of these concepts to life at home – family, social, or leisure time – and you can see some of the same correlations. If a stay-at-home mom tried to live like this, her children would revolt rather quickly. General schedules like lunch around noon are great, but most children will not go down for a nap at exactly 11:40 and wake up at 1:10. It just isn’t a reality.

And yet, this is EXACTLY the way we run one of our country’s biggest institutions – the pubic school system. Math time starts when reading time ends, children are fed when they aren’t hungry (or have to wait to eat while their stomachs are grumbling), and that really great science project isn’t given the attention or time that it deserves. The really interesting part of all this is that after these children graduate, having spent 12 years in this kind of system, we are annoyed that they don’t know how to manage their time, or get things done! It’s kind of like training someone for 12 years to be a dancer, and then being angry at them for not knowing how to be a veterinarian.

Schools like Sego Lily School and the Sudbury Valley School give children the responsibility of managing their time at an early age. They learn to prioritize, and to choose activities in which they really want to engage. They also are given the freedom to fully throw themselves into those activities in which they have a real interest and passion, whether they choose math or painting or basketball. The point is that from the time these children enter a Sudbury model school, THEY get to choose how to spend their time, and not have it dictated by the sounds of bells or a teacher’s voice saying “Let’s move on.”

Often we hear an argument that sounds something like this: “Well, in the REAL world there are schedules, and you can’t tell your boss that you’ll do your work when you feel like it!” We agree completely with this argument. However, we counter that when people of any age are participating in activities by choice – a job they chose, a class they want to take, a project they are excited about – they also choose the structures that come with that activity. If a Sudbury student chooses to take a math class, she may have to arrive at 10am and do homework assignments. However, the mere fact that she chose to take the class alters her perception of those structures – she chose them along with the class itself.

The results of this kind of learning show (as outlined in both Pursuit of Happiness and Legacy of Trust, research done by Sudbury Valley School on their graduates) that students become happy, productive members of the “real world.” An advantage they have over other productive, happy members of society is that they left school ready to manage their own schedules, go to college classes on time, or get their work done on the job. The work that most American young adults do in college – of finding their path in life, maturing, and learning to live responsibly – is done ahead of time. And we don’t have to waste time being angry at the results of a system that we created.