This story in a local paper is about two boys who took a year off between middle school and high school.
What sounds too good to be true is in fact the real-life adventures of Stephen Krach and Kyle Blair, who enter Los Gatos High School this week as freshmen. The travels took place during what has been dubbed “the year between”—when the boys took time off, after graduating from Fisher Middle School and before enrolling in high school, to make the world their classroom.
Thought by their parents to be young for their grade level, Krach and Blair, both 14 at the time, were presented with an option: take a year off to travel to different countries, work hard and test their abilities.
I have no idea how the parents came up with this idea or with the extremely eclectic itinerary that they devised. Eclectic to the point of appearing a bit flighty, but perhaps the parents decided to give their kids the widest possible range of experiences to see what would stick. Hey…expose kids to lots of interesting things and see what they take away from it, instead of forcing them to learn a whole bunch of seemingly A concept we might call…wait…there’s a term for this, I know there is…
“There were rules. They could not fritter the year away,” said Laird. The curriculum he developed for the boys ranged from having to keep a daily journal, write reports and learn at least 30 words from each country they visited to studying the countries’ political and monetary systems. The boys were also expected to go on challenging excursions that would count as physical education.
At least one adult was always with Krach and Blair. Oftentimes the boys’ parents would take turns flying to different countries with them.
On their own, Krach and Blair studied math so they would not fall behind their peers.
My favorite bit:
Their final project involved delivering an oral presentation using PowerPoint slides to the Los Gatos Lions Club in June.
Powerpoint: the key to a successful life. (Or, according to Edward Tufte, the root of all evil. Which is a pretty simple dichotomy, no? Link via Ceej.)
Now, not everyone can afford such an extravagant way to experience the world. But one year in “the real world” (or at least parts of the world vastly different from the mostly homogeneous and upper-class Silicon Valley) evidently made an amazing difference in these kids. One year. A key quote from the article:
“Being treated as an adult rather than a kid to be taken care of made him look at himself differently. He saw himself more capable than he would have otherwise,” (Krach’s mother) said.
You know, this article has done a marvelous job of helping to sell me on how to teach kids and grow them into good people, and it doesn’t involve them going back to school. (It doesn’t involve flying them around the world a couple of times either, though that is always a nice bonus.) If these kids had such an amazing transformation doing this sort of thing during one year, imagine if they had this sort of education all the time. If they were always learning in the world, from a variety of other people, maybe that maturity would have arrived a while ago. And maybe so many people wouldn’t report being surprised by it.
What we all know is—sorry boys, but this is the truth—in another year they’ll be right back to being the people they were, more concerned with their Nintendos and their peers than their independence and broader outlooks. But maybe it would be different if they learned like that all the time.