As we bring up our children, we have to remember that we are caretakers of the future. By improving their education, we improve the future of mankind, the future of this world.
—Immanuel Kant
John Adams’s father wanted nothing but for his son to go to college. John Adams wanted to do anything but go to school. He often skipped class to go fishing or hunting or to fly his kite. He didn’t like his teachers. He didn’t think he was learning anything useful. He had no interest in furthering his education.
So when he declared that he wanted to be a farmer, his father took him down to the salt marsh to cut thatch and wade through muck, showing him what that work would actually be like. The next day, John went back to school, though soon enough he was struggling again. “I don’t like my schoolmaster,” he told his father. “He is so negligent and cross that I can never learn anything under him.” The next day, Adams’s father enrolled him in the private school down the road. There, under a schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh, Adams made a dramatic turn. He was studying. He was reading. And in less than a year, the fifteen-year-old was pronounced “fitted for college.” The following fall, he was enrolled at Harvard.
Our job as parents is to put our kids in environments in which they can thrive and blossom. Our job is to work with them to find their lane. That environment may not be the first school we drop them into. It might take several tries and a fair amount of experimentation. It will definitely take patience. That doesn’t matter.
What matters is that we help them realize who they are meant to be.