For the next few months, I am going to do a brief recap of some powerful parenting (with educational topics) books I’ve read.
Sometimes reading quotes from books helps shift my mindset on certain topics and gets me focused on what’s really important when raising children.
Book Title: Most Likely to Succeed
Author: Tony Wagner
Book Synopsis:
From two leading experts in education and entrepreneurship, an urgent call for the radical re-imagining of American education so that we better equip students for the realities of the twenty-first century economy.
Today more than ever, we prize academic achievement, pressuring our children to get into the “right” colleges, have the highest GPAs, and pursue advanced degrees. But while students may graduate with credentials, by and large they lack the competencies needed to be thoughtful, engaged citizens and to get good jobs in our rapidly evolving economy. Our school system was engineered a century ago to produce a work force for a world that no longer exists. Alarmingly, our methods of schooling crush the creativity and initiative young people need to thrive in the twenty-first century.
In Most Likely to Succeed, bestselling author and education expert Tony Wagner and venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith call for a complete overhaul of the function and focus of American schools, sharing insights and stories from the front lines, including profiles of successful students, teachers, parents, and business leaders.
Most Likely to Succeed presents a new vision of American education, one that puts wonder, creativity, and initiative at the very heart of the learning process and prepares students for today’s economy. This book offers parents and educators a crucial guide to getting the best for their children and a roadmap for policymakers and opinion leaders.
My Review:
This book opened my eyes VERY WIDE to what I need to do NOW to prepare my children for their FUTURE. Our educational system is outdated. It can feel daunting to hear this as a parent, wondering, “How in the world can little old me do something to change this?” But I found that I can start in my own home, with my own children. I can make TIME for them to be children. Make TIME for them to explore their creativity (in short, don’t overschedule them and allow them to be bored).
Top Ten Quotes:
- “An overarching goal of education should be to immerse students in the beauty and inspiration of their surrounding world.”
- “To have good prospects in life—to be most likely to succeed—young adults now need to be creative and innovative problem-solvers.”
- “Once again, the education model revolves around what makes life easy for test designers, not what’s best for kids.”
- “Students who only know how to perform well in today’s education system—get good grades and test scores, and earn degrees—will no longer be those who are most likely to succeed. Thriving in the twenty-first century will require real competencies, far more than academic credentials.”
- “Education needs to help our youth discover their passions and purpose in life, develop the critical skills needed to be successful in pursuing their goals, be inspired on a daily basis to do their very best, and be active and informed citizens.”
- “U.S. education is failing, in large part, because of the misguided belief that it’s imperative to test on a massive scale.”
- “While nearly 80 percent of fifth graders report being engaged at school, that number drops to only 40 percent by the start of high school. And according to Brandon Busteed, executive director of education at Gallup, “Teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their ‘opinions count’ at work and their ‘supervisors create an open and trusting environment.”
- “Startling shift. In 1997 chess champ Gary Kasparov was beaten by a computer. Fourteen years later, IBM’s Watson beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy. By 2014, companies like Narrative Science are able to produce a coherent computer generated corporate earnings report. This “startling shift” according to MIT’s Andrew McAfee signals the beginning of AI doing to white collar jobs what robotics did to blue collar jobs.
- “I’m on a mission to change our education system “so that it promotes, instead of vitiates, innovative kids.”
- “The only surviving skills that will save young kids are creative and innovative. As the current school system is now, for 12 of 16 years, you’re not in an environment that brings that out of them.”
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