NMCM All Things Family Blog

I think that teaching kids to think like business owners is increasingly important, because when you evaluate traditional education in terms of reward for effort, it tends to come up short.

It’s incredibly hard work to get good grades in school.

Jenny Ford wrote on teaching kids how to earn money at Hubpages recently that “My 12-year-old twins had five assignments due in a two-week period, recently, and what the household went through to get all those assignments completed was like running a marathon! We had scheduling rosters for computer time, meals planned around the times when the dining table would be covered in cardboard, and a couple of late night pushes to get the finishing touches put on them. And these kids are only twelve!”

Some of the curriculum content is of questionable value, but you have to do what the school system says you have to do, because that’s the only way to get to college. And college is the only way to get a professional job or occupation. And a professional job or occupation is the only way to … what, exactly?

Once upon a time, a good job was your passport to a good life. Study hard, get a good education, get a good job, and you were set.

These days, that guarantee no longer exists. We should be teaching kids to think like business owners% instead.

Increasingly, people following the traditional path to success through paid employment are being expected to sacrifice other aspects of their lives – their relationships, their health, and their spirituality, just to name a few – in order to secure an income.

We are pushing that attitude onto kids at younger and younger ages. College students, to offset the enormous cost of college, are working multiple jobs as well as studying. There is no longer any time for students to linger over philosophical discussions in coffee shops. These days, they are all waiting the tables, instead!

High school students aiming to get in to the best colleges are not only cramming for exams, they are also cramming in extracurricular activities, part-time jobs, volunteer work, and anything else which might boost them up in the college admissions stakes.

We are moving more and more to a Japanese-style model, where the performance pressure begins at the level of gaining admission to the right pre-school, and intensifies from there.

And this whole dehumanising juggernaut is built on the basis of this old assumption – get a good education, get a good job, and you will be set for life. It is worth all that sacrifice in the early years to secure your future.

Hello, everyone, wake up!

There is no secure future at the end of this rainbow.

Ok, so we are somewhat stuck with our current schooling system, but on the bright side, kids will usually come out of the current system with the ability to look up information. And schools do an OK job of educating kids about some physical health issues, like good nutrition and exercise habits, and the dangers of smoking.

As for the rest of it? Relationship skills? Money skills? That’s up to us, the parents.

Despite the mad, crazy round of other demands on our time, we owe it to our kids to make sure they get all four keystones in place before they leave home. If you need to drop piano lessons, or dancing, or softball, for a couple of years, maybe that’s worth doing, if it frees up the time to cover the things that are really important. We all want to know we are raising our kids to be healthy, wealthy, and, most importantly, happy, for the rest of their lives. We need to be teaching kids to think like business owners. And that won’t happen without a plan.

Tags: Parenting

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