“Mommy, daddy, our school won at giving . . .”
Why isn’t that the norm? The proudest thing a kid can say?
When I was a teacher I audited a colleague’s art class. For a week the students had to sell what art they had made. The student who sold the most got an “A.” The point was to teach these students, some of whom wanted to go to art school, about business and commerce and not to be afraid of saying: “This is my work, would you like to buy it?”
No one sold a ton, but everyone sold something and together the class made enough cash so that at the end there was a discussion: “what if we did something with this money collectively?”
And this was before the Internet opened up a worldwide audience to such students.
Making and selling as part of learning, rather than sitting and testing as a way of pretending to learn, ought to be the norm.
Sure, there would be more of an audience for a future Justin Bieber than a fledgling Doris Kearns Goodwin, but whether kids were hawking their art or their research, thinking of the world as an actual audience would make their work more meaningful, would raise the bar.
And lots of stuff that might not be good enough to sell would be good enough to give away. Either people would want the stuff or it would be practice in the craft of making better things.
For any money that comes in you could set a simple percentage:
80% of everything we make through our work here goes to charity, 10% to the school itself, and 10% to the student (or students) most connected to the thing made.
Then have the president or the governor or the NCAA make a big deal out of the schools that give away the most, or which bump up its numbers from 80% to 90% and so forth.
We talk of “mindset,” “wellness” “resilience” and all the rest. But these are, in essence, a way to inoculate students against a system that would grind them down and drive them out of their own desire to create.
Why not have a system of creating instead and change education from being about individual achievement in the name of acquisition into edification through giving?
And then, as it says in the Molly Manifesto:
Rather than rank them by athletic program, number of Nobel prizes won, wealth of graduates at age 45, or the gildedness of the campus, schools should be ranked by how much they give away.