Any Road Will Get You There

Back in my short-lived days as a junior business executive, one of my colleagues had a sign on his wall that read: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." It was a statement about the importance of setting goals, plotting a course between here and there, then sticking to the plan come hell or high water. It's a common enough concept, especially popular among self-help gurus and motivational speakers. It makes sense. I mean, if you want to some day be something you're not, say an Olympic medalist or wealthy tycoon, the person you are today must start taking steps toward becoming the kind of person who wins the gold or amasses fortunes. 

Before she retired, my mother answered phones at the offices of a large school district. She quite regularly received calls from newly pregnant mothers inquiring about programs for gifted children, and specifically how they could get their unborn child enrolled in them. Those of us who know anything about young children tend to find this kind of goal-setting by proxy to be, at best, misguided if not harmful, yet as educators and parents we find ourselves doing it all the time.

For instance, it's typically adults who set potty training goals on behalf of their toddlers. We're tired of lugging around diaper bags, so we, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, set them on the road to being a "big girl" or "big boy." Of course, this common sense goal is in an entirely different category from charting a course from preschool to Harvard, but they are points along the same continuum. 

My colleague's motivational sign rubbed me the wrong way as did his whole go-go vibe. One day, I joked, "I already know we're all going to wind up in the same place. I think I'd rather take the scenic route." 

As reasonable as it seems to set goals and keep my eyes on the prize, I've never been able to embrace it. Even in my early 20's I knew that the best things in my life -- my wife, my job, my friends, the exciting city in which I lived, my funky-cool apartment in a funky-cool neighborhood -- were not the products of goal-setting. And even while I saw the logic of goal-setting, staying-the-course, hard work, and perseverance, looking back I can see that I never believed in it. The future was always just too far away, but more significantly, how did I know that the person I would be in the future would still value the goals set by the person I am today?

I mean, at one point, I thought I wanted to be the creative director in a large Madison Avenue advertising agency. The man I am today can think of few things more soul crushing. When researchers ask people to predict how much their ideals, likes and dislikes, and behavior will change over the course of the next decade, most people say "very little." This explains why someone might get a tattoo they later regret. At the same time, when asked how much they've changed over the past 10 years, they tend to say "quite a lot." One of the reasons I treasure this blog is that when I go back and read things I wrote in 2009, I can see, often with chagrin, the person I used to be. In another decade, I expect I'll look back on things I write today, perhaps even this very post, and cringe at who I used to be. How can this person of today possibly set goals for that person of tomorrow?

Psychologist and author Tim Kasser once asked college students to write down their goals, not for some distant future, but just for the next few months, then to rate how happy they thought they would feel upon achieving those goals. They then used diaries to track their progress on two fronts: goal achievement and their feeling of well-being. Not surprisingly, he found that those who had set goals related to money or academic achievement, saw no progress at all toward happiness, even if they had made progress toward their goals. Indeed, their state of well-being remained unchanged whether or not they had made progress toward their goal. On the other hand, and also unsurprisingly, those who set goals having to do with relationships or personal growth found that their sense of well-being improved as they worked toward their goals. 

In other words, those who set the kinds of external goals represented by putting together a resume that would get them into Harvard, are gambling with their day-to-day happiness. They are betting that by sacrificing today's well-being, they will be rewarded with well-being at some point in the future. I'm reminded of the idiom: One in the hand is worth two in the bush. There is, in terminology my business colleague would have understood, a significant opportunity cost for this kind of external goal-setting.

I never planned to become a preschool teacher. My degree is in journalism. I worked in pubic relations, bookkeeping, communications, baseball, and as a freelance writer before finding myself, by happy accident, in the profession that has defined my adult life. It was a matter of luck or opportunism, not goal-setting, that found me in a cooperative preschool in a system that was unapologetically play-based. I've never worked in standard schools, which are in the business of setting external goals for children, "for their own good," in the form of behavioral and academic benchmarks, a system ruled by ranking, grades, curricula, and, should the child deviate too much from the road that ostensibly leads to the adult-determined destination, interventions. Lots of interventions. Through elementary school, the children themselves have very little say when it comes to setting their own goals, and frankly, precious little thereafter. 

Why are we so afraid of allowing children to set their own goals?

I imagine it's largely because we feel, as adults, that we know better. We've been there. We've made mistakes, have regrets, and we want the youngsters to benefit from our great wisdom and hard-earned experience. And even as we acknowledge that much of what we ourselves learned in school was forgotten long ago, often as soon as we'd passed the test which represented the next step along the road toward the goal of graduation, we bizarrely persist in marching them along the very road that our experience tells us won't necessarily lead to happiness. In contrast, when we allow children to set their own goals, to play, to direct their own learning, they are not forced to sacrifice their pursuit of happiness on the alter of some materialistic goal that may or may not have value to the person they will be when they get there. Indeed, their happiness, or well-being, is found right now, in the pursuit, which is to say, life itself.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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