I have been a teacher for almost two decades yet I am still stumped when it comes to my own children – aged 6 and 8. Over cereal this morning I was asked: to list the most venomous spiders in the world by region; how to find ‘C’ on a piano keyboard; who is the best Australian author; and whether you tie soccer boot laces differently to school shoe laces. I garbled something like “I promise we’ll visit the Reptile Park for your birthday, we’ll google it tonight… where’s your father?”
In my work in Admissions & Communications, I am asked equally divergent questions but I have the advantage of being able to draw on the brains trust of scientists, musicians, avid readers and elite sportspeople who work here. I could really have used them this morning but generally we are more reticent to call on the brains trust when navigating parenting.
Why? In part, it is because we quite properly want to maintain some oversight of our children’s development and to ensure that discussions of sometimes complex issues are consistent with family values. This can be a challenge, however, given that children have access to more and more sources of information. Even if it were right to do so, it is not practicable for parents alone to arbitrate increasingly divergent and ubiquitous content. Whilst parents may manage imparting or sourcing information well, it is impossible for us to evaluate all the information passing in front of our children, especially when so much of it is garnered from social media platforms or peer interaction – which necessarily happens in places and contexts beyond our reach.
There is another issue in parenting, which is that the rules of the game constantly change and yet we are required to adapt without any specific preparation. In the professional sphere, normal practice is to acquire expertise through intensive tertiary education, mentorship and then practical experience. Not so in parenting especially since, as soon as we feel like experts, our children inconveniently blossom and move onto the next stage of development. We can’t even rely on the second child following the same path as the first – and so we can never truly become experts.
So what to do?
In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki suggests that we should engage the brains trust. As a statistician, he is obsessed with Galton’s counter-intuitive findings that the ‘average’ opinion of a mixed crowd – even when there is disagreement and even when there are outliers – is very often close to perfect. He posits a theory: under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them… despite all the limitation, when our imperfect judgements are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent (p. XIII).
In his view, ‘wise crowds’ need to encompass diversity of opinion, promote independence, facilitate decision-making by those with the best knowledge of context, have mechanisms to aggregate individual judgments into collective decisions and be trusted. These are also the characteristics of a healthy school community and it underlines the importance of creating regular opportunities for communication and connection across our community – whether that’s via formal channels such as focus groups and surveys or via informal means cultivated through social events and personal connections. Our parents and alumnae have great expertise and a wide range of perspectives and experiences. Our teachers and staff similarly bring not just the breadth and depth of their educational knowledge but long experience of working with young people in a wide variety of contexts. Together, that creates a vast pool of wisdom and creativity and support, through which we can create the best possible future for our girls.
Reading list:
This article is based on: James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds
For the opposing theory: Charles Mackeay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
If you’re interested in these sorts of things: Robert M. Sapolsky Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst