Most Likely To...

Most Likely to Succeed, 2015

In the midst of our daily battles over which child is sitting in the other's chair and 'I want the milk in the green sippy cup,' and 'You broke my muffin,' and 'Oscar took my toast' (when there is plenty of toast, and no one is eating it anyway because they would rather see what happens when they pour orange juice on top of it...) I have been thinking a lot about school options and touring a few with varying philosophies. Obviously the boys are going to be genius civil rights activists, rocket scientists, architects, or entrepreneurs right?

A while back, I read The Smartest Kids in the World. In that vein, I watched the trailer for Most Likely to Succeed and have been reading the book. I'm a nerd; I like to research things obsessively years before I really need to worry about them. 

The theory behind 'Most Likely To...' is very anti-testing, even the type of international testing that's lauded in The Smartest Kids in the World, but the books aren't entirely at odds. The book's authors (grads of Harvard and Stanford, and now ultra-successful in their chosen fields) believe that kids need to be creative and even a little anti-authoritarian to make it in today's economy, and that the current school system we have (whether it's public or private, state or Ivy League) fails exactly the kinds of kids who might just be most successful in the 21st century environment.

Instead of discrete classes in Chemistry or U.S. History, the authors say students should be doing a ton of project-based interdisciplinary work that more closely resembles the real world and stokes their individual passions. Anyway, it spoke to me quite a bit and reassured me about some of the choices we're making about schools, after school activities, and all the rest of it.

And some more food for thought: "The Montessori Mafia"...