From Start to Finish
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2024-2025
I thought this particular fellow was aiming to win the couch-potato-of-the-year award. Both he and his sister were children of an older couple who had married late and seemed lost with teenage kids. While his sister was a hyper-motivated academic powerhouse, the brother was not. We tried to encourage the boy to do at least some school work, but the inertia was too great. As this young man reached sixteen, we were wondering what would become of him. Then a miracle happened.
Now old enough to get his driver’s license, this young man quickly found work in the local mill. Within a year he had graduated to foreman and eventually became a manager within the company. We could never have predicted this would happen with this young man.
This experience happened early in our facilitation career and it taught us to be more tolerant of students displaying disinterest in book learning. There are many more ways to learn than simply doing academic exercises.
The other lesson we learned is that some people simply learn what will be immediately useful to survive. While this young man may not have passed a geometry test or entered an essay writing contest, he did have natural leadership skills that he developed to his advantage. No algebra required.
Still with the same family, the sister married another one of our students at the age of twenty. Her husband, a very nice fellow, suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of twenty-four. The wife was pregnant with their first child when this happened. We were all dumbfounded by this tragedy, yet we all found some comfort in the fact that before the child was born, the father’s brother married his brother’s wife and continued in his brother’s place.
There are so many stories I could tell about children arriving at their place of calling at an early age. When students are educated outside of the standardized system, they do not have to meet standardized expectations which attempt to make everyone the same. Home educated students are allowed to be comfortable in their own skins and to learn what is required to succeed in their respective lives. Those who have an entrepreneurial bent usually start businesses at a young age. Academic students have started online university courses at thirteen years of age. Hands-on students are often involved in a trade before officially entering an apprenticeship at age sixteen. Letting children be who they are rather than programming them to be something else is the best thing we can do.
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