School reports are out and some kids didn’t do as well as others, or as well as they would’ve liked. While it has been a rough year, that fact is still a tough reality to have to accept.
I am reminded of this every time I see a social media post of yet another very proud parent telling the world how proud they are of how well their child did.
And of course there’s nothing wrong with bragging about your smart kid. But I can’t help thinking how that must impact those kids who aren’t as academic and who just managed to scrape through, or maybe not at all.
Sadly the global education system doesn’t accommodate kids with different talents, and the world puts disproportionate emphasis on academic excellence above everything else.
It doesn’t matter if your kid has an aptitude for art, is an awesome athlete, an extraordinary dancer or a natural musician, if they can’t get the hang of those few examinable subjects, they are deemed failures.
And this despite the fact that we are trying to train today’s kids for a future that is going to be very different to anything we’ve known.
Sadly our education system is churning out people with skills that would have benefited the world 50 years ago.
So what I am trying to say is, don’t be too hard on those kids who didn’t perform very well. They may well have other talents that are not being catered for in the schooling system.
Instead look for ways to nurture those talents, because it could well become their professions one day.
Modern and future economies are in need of a greater variety of skills than we didn’t need before.
There are jobs today that didn’t even exist a few short years ago and that means that in a few years’ time, there will be jobs that we can’t possibly imagine today.
You kid may just be heading for one of those.