An old and wise friend told me a story about a turning point in his childhood. He was from a large family that had little money and relatively little education, with a violent father and a loving mother. The older siblings moved out as soon as they could to escape a difficult home and, as the youngest and most defiant, he was often the target of his father’s anger. But one day, when he was about 14, he decided to paint his (shared) bedroom. He saved up the money and did it himself one Saturday afternoon and, as he looked around and drank in the transformation, it sank in that that he really could make his own life better. He went on to great things.
Developing agency, the capacity to act independently and make our own free choices, is essential to a fulfilling and purposeful life, but it is hard. Throwing around slogans – ‘you can do anything’, ‘life is what you make it’ – won’t take us far (even if there is a grain of truth). More honest and more helpful is to acknowledge the difficulties, address the barriers and then set high expectations.
One barrier is the gap between our aspirations and our actions, which is a uniquely human phenomenon. Anyone who has struggled with a study schedule or an exercise plan knows how our higher intentions can be overwhelmed by immediate wants. It is not a new struggle – St Paul was complaining about it 2000 years ago (‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.’ Rom 7:15) – and it is one that we can only expect to master over time.
This is why at Queenwood we constantly come back to the need for the girls to develop independence and take responsibility for their own decisions, which can only occur when parents and teachers step back and allow them to bear the consequences of bad decisions. Sometimes we also need to articulate to the girls very explicitly the connection between their aspirations and actions. It is understandably upsetting if, say, she misses out on a leadership role but she doesn’t have to wait for leadership to be conferred. We should sympathise with her disappointment even as we set the bar high: you think you have something to offer? I do, too - so go out and do it! As they say: be the change you want to see in the world. High expectations are a sign of respect because they express our belief in that person’s potential.
Another barrier is the gap between our beliefs and our actions. The girls attending Cleanwood, our Senior School environmental club, yesterday grappled with a series of examples of how people who say that they are committed to environmental issues make inconsistent choices: by joining an online movement to abolish paper use altogether but repeatedly using takeaway coffee cups; by campaigning to reduce the exploitation of resources through forestry and mining while wearing fast fashion or tearing out a well-functioning kitchen simply to update the look; by marching for a climate strike and then jumping on a plane every school holiday. If we’re honest, almost every one of us is going to find some glaring gap between what we say we believe and what we actually do. At some level this is simply a muddled but pragmatic response to an imperfect world, but at its extremes we may have to admit that this has an ugly name: hypocrisy.
When young people first encounter these gaps, reactions vary – from surprise to indignation and even, in unhappy cases, to cynicism. How can we help them respond positively, with determination to meet the challenge, rather than falling into passive fatalism or even anxiety?
We can do this by stressing their agency, even in the face of uncertainty and imperfection. By having nuanced conversations about the paradoxes of human behaviour. (Writers like Dean Burnett, Daniel Kahnemann and Jonathan Haidt offer fascinating insights from psychology and neuroscience.) By having great conversations over dinner about the values of your family and how they shape your daily lives. By exploring other viewpoints and how to have a good argument (rather than a judgmental shouting match). (An excellent recent discussion on persuasion is here.) By encouraging our children to link their actions to their beliefs – and bracing ourselves for the moment when they come back at us with our own inconsistencies! They certainly do that to us at school, and we are all the better for it.
We want our girls to be a force for good in the world, to march out there with a sense of justice and purpose and hope. But to be effective they need to understand that the struggle will be long and hard. They need self-awareness, self-discipline and a sophisticated knowledge of the world, and to change hearts and minds they will also need a nuanced understanding of human behaviours. Honest conversations at school and at home about our own values and behaviours are a great way to start them on the way.
Ms Elizabeth Stone
Principal