I’ve spent my career being told that shooting for the “ideal environment” for adolescents is impossible; that we must be “pragmatic” and make compromises when necessary in our work.
What if the problem isn’t reality but our understanding of if? What if the “ideal environment” wasn’t a state of finality or achievement, but a never ending process that could begin immediately?
In this episode of Breaking the Paradigm, Taylor Henry joins the Two Timers Club for a session recorded live at Bovina Center Montessori School. Over the course of our conversation, Taylor and I trace a thread that starts with the fear adults carry into adolescent environments. Along the way, we wrestle with the tension between giving up control and still being expected to deliver outcomes (and how we might get away from that). We also examine what happens when adults, out of fear, conditioning, and a culture that has socialized imagination right out of us, preemptively control the young people we claim to be liberating.
And while this conversation broke new ground for Taylor and I, many of the threads that came up have been ruminating in our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum, the first global community of practice made up of practitioners and leaders who gather to discuss how we can all live up to our calling to serve adolescent development. If you’d like to join our next session, check us out here!
This is a conversation about patience, about the courage to let development unfold on its own timeline, and about living our ideal as a process, now.
Thanks, Taylor, for a great conversation!
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The traditional education system had its chance.
Now it’s our turn.
