Adam voitz On nine is a former principle and founder of Real Schools, a key national education body is calling for kindness. Milseye something could learn classes in schools to teach children how to be more resilient than empathetic and help prevent bullying.
Good morning, Adam, how are you morning jents?
Can you really teach someone to be empathetic?
No, you can't. So in this situation, it's a classic example of the right intention our kids are. They're lacking in kindness, they're lacking in empathy, they're lacking in compassion. But the way to get that done is not to have teachers mandated to run a kindness lesson on a Wednesday afternoon. I end up giving a really good mark to a kid for a really fabulous kindness poster, and they watch that kid go out of the yard and belt someone over their head with a rolls up kindness poster.
They get better at posters, not at kindness. Kindness is something you learn in context, and if we want to solve that problem, we need to put our energy.
So the best way to teach kindness is to be kind exactly.
And so what we need to do is to ask ourselves. How do you build kind young people? And they build it in company of other people. So to be really honest, if we're going to be spending money on trying to build kind kids, I would be sending an unbuilt Billy carts to every family in Australia and telling them that they get their tax break if they can send a video in of their kid and other kids building and using that old billy card. You learn it from the
thousands of hours you get in the Argie barge. You're getting things right and wrong. Schools can plain an important role in that, but outsourcing it to a lesson on kindness is frankly an exercising futility.
Actually, he rose a very good point. I think of my development as a person, and I was lucky enough I had good, strong parents. But I learned a lot from my friendship group and interacting with their families and their brothers and their sisters, and even to this day they're a major part of my life.
Yeah, it's an enormous cumulative task to become a kind person or a compassionate person, and there are contributions made by like you said, by his family, and sometimes there's variability. Some families do it better than others. It's true you learn it around the dinner table, but you learn it in the street as well by having those hundreds it's not thousands of hours with your friends who don't always treat you really well. And that's where you actually pick
up the resilience bit as well. But our kids aren't there. They're not in the street, you know, they're in lound rooms and they're on their phones. And so we've got to actually replace that with the opportunity to be face to face with authentic, meaty people if we really want to build kindness in young people. Because this pattern of like outsourcing it to a mini lesson at a school,
actually invites some stuff we don't want. One it squeezes out that of the learning time until it invites these kind of either parent or state funded morality lessons coming into our schools that nobody really is in favor of.
Ith I agree with that either. I think back to my group of friends and though would stick out for our minds, but they'll give you a lot of stick as.
Well, exactly. And so how do you become resilient. It's not by learning about resilience. It's not by making a buraal about it. It's not through a theme day where we get everyone out on the oval and get them and spell out the word say no to bully so that a drone can take a photo for our Instagram. You learn in this discomfort and in schools. So there's
a lesson we can learn for this in schools. And there are schools around the country at the moment worried about lunchtime that a lot of things go wrong at lunchtime. It all goes wrong in the last ten minutes, so they're trimming ten minutes off lunchtime. They actually need that time about ten minutes where things are a bit ugly at lunchtime, it's actually good stuff. That's where the kids are learn We need to learn how to help them
learn in that situation. Stop expecting it to be perfect and stop expecting them to be safe all the time.
More playtime, I reckon, Adam, more playtime.
I totally agree. I think it's Simon will actually let them be face to face and let them get dirty them, let them have a little a little bit of things going wrong, let them learn how to get over it. That's how they get the job done.
Good on you, my founder of Real Schools, Adam Vought, a former principal, learned. I think he's got his hand on that particular topic with a lot of fine grips.