The following is the abstract from a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, Number 20749 (December 2014). It is entitled, Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success. The authors include Tim Kautz, James J. Heckman, Ron Diris, Bas ter Weel, and Lex Borghans.
Character is shaped by families, schools, and social environments. Skill development is a dynamic process in which the early years lay the foundation for successful investment in later years. High-quality early childhood and elementary school programs improve character skills in a lasting and cost-effective way. Many of them beneficially affect later-life outcomes without improving cognition.
There are fewer long-term evaluations of adolescent interventions, but workplace-based programs that teach character skills are promising. The common feature of successful interventions across all stages of the life cycle through adulthood is that they promote attachment and provide a secure base for exploration and learning for the child. Successful interventions emulate the mentoring environments offered by successful families.
There is so much to these statements. I’ve divided the abstract from the NBER article into chunks so that I can digest what is being said as a child, a parent, an educator of adolescents, and a citizen of the United States and the World.
For this blog posting, I will consider these statements as the child of two parents who grew up on working farms in families where education was an expected standard and norm.
Character is undoubtedly developed when a child respects the life cycle of plants and animals.
My first childhood memories are from my grandparents’ farm, which we visited every summer. More importantly, though, we lived in France as I entered school for the first time. My mother organized visits to art museums, cathedrals, chateaus, and castles, where we drank in the history of Europe and Western traditions. My father organized visits to cemeteries and battlefields of World Wars I and II. The balance between these two perspectives was my first character education class.
Today would be my mother’s birthday. I have chosen this day to inaugurate this blog post about the importance of imagination. As an educator of immigrants and reluctant adolescents, I have tried to use the base my parents instilled in me — as an educator in my classes. The last quote above is especially relevant:
“Successful interventions emulate the mentoring environments offered by successful families.”
This is the taste of heaven I try to create for my students, who sometimes struggle to embrace the challenges a new life or a new ecology presents.