Commentary: Schools should teach resilience to all K-12 students

“So I ask all of you, what do you think education should be?” Sandy Asper wrote in a July 26 Daily Pilot commentary.

Asper listed differing definitions from a half-dozen thinkers. She also notes that a TED Talk asking an even narrower question (What should be the purpose of education?) received 365 completely different answers out of 365. As you might have guessed, there’s no single answer that can satisfy everyone.

Rather than just add another idea to the already rafters-high stack of ideas of what education should be, I’ll ask a fundamental question:

No matter how education changes, is there a way to reliably help our children prosper in the 21st century?

I suggest this answer: help them be highly resilient. Resilience is a win-win: it can make life more prosperous and happier.

If children are highly resilient, they can better bounce back from the adversities that are expected to be harsher and more frequent in this century. In addition, research shows that people who are highly resilient typically enjoy their challenges more.

Education should include formal, age-appropriate training in resilience. This should be provided at all grade levels in public and private schools. Resilience can be taught directly to most people, because research shows it depends primarily on skills, not on disposition or personality type.

Yes, parents intuitively know to teach it to their children. (“It’s OK, honey. Take a break and try it again later.”) And coaches teach it to their teams, and drill sergeants teach it to military recruits.

So why emphasize new resilience training now, when civilization has done well with traditional ways? First, these traditional avenues are indirect and limited in their generality. In particular, sports and military training are especially narrow, and not every child participates in sports or enters the military.

Second, the traditional ways are not up to the task of teaching a well-rounded resilience that is now needed. The new century is already fraught with greater challenges and adversities, and promises to be more so with each passing year. Our children will have to make their way through Thomas Friedman’s “flat world,” a highly globalized, fast paced, and competitive economic life, one that’s only tenuously held together by an increasingly threadbare social and political fabric.

As adults, they will have to compete with lower-wage offshore workers ranging from fast-food order takers to radiologists and lawyers. And they will have to compete not only with people, but also with ever more powerful computers and ever more capable robots. Then there’s the continual creative destruction spawned by the Internet.

Our children can expect little stability in their lives. To prosper, they’ll need to be able to recover from bigger and more frequent reverses.

Here are results we could expect if K-12 schools formally taught resilience:

Students are more willing to try something new and to risk failure if they are highly resilient. This speaks to a need mentioned by Patrice Apadoca in her Aug. 22 Daily Pilot column. She contended, “What’s needed is the message that it’s acceptable for a kid to try something and find it’s not a good fit, or try something and like it, even if he or she isn’t particularly good at it.”

Newport-Mesa children will have a leg up in climbing the ladder of success if they can learn to be more resilient than the cohort of the world’s children who are just as smart.

The more resilient students can become, the better they’ll do academically, since they won’t fear failure as much. As a result, perceived difficulties such as “math phobia” might become small. Result: same teachers, better scores.

I picture the schools being able to say they have strong “STREAM” programs: Science, Technology, Resilience, Engineering, Art and Math.

An Internet search on teaching resilience yields many hits. For example, the George Lucas Educational Foundation provides a curated list of resources at edutopia.org/resilience-grit-resources.

At heart, education encourages students to learn how to learn. Being more resilient can encourage students to surmount obstacles and learn far more than if they feared failure. Throughout their lives, such resilience can foster a more prosperous and happy life.

Costa Mesa resident TOM EGAN is a former Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustee.