By Steve Coxsey
A couple of years back I won a friendly bidding war during the auction at my younger son’s Montessori school fundraiser. I bought a picture of his class posing with their teachers, Ms. Marisa and Ms. Delaina. The children’s signatures are on the matting around the edge. The signatures are special, and a nice reminder of a specific time in my son’s life, but I was especially interested in the picture because of what else is on the matting.
Each child answered the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I coach people on self-discovery and personal and professional development, so this sort of thing speaks to me. On the one hand, the question, so common in our culture, means, “What job do you want to do when you grow up?” That question, along with the American tendency to ask people, “What do you do?” when we first meet them, shows how much we identify each other and ourselves by our work.
Unintentionally, that has caused a lot of frustration for people who have a job just to make money and don’t identify with the title. They think their hobbies and interests or community service more closely define who they are. Others get frustrated because they’re in a job and miserable, but they can’t figure out what sort of work they really want to do. Since work and identity are considered interconnected, many of them feel lost.
One of the best parts of the picture I bought is the nature of the children’s responses. They said things like cowboy, video game designer, horseback rider, scientist, farmer, teacher, artist, and business owner. They did not say things like “assistant contract manager for a marketing agency” or “level three accounting specialist.”
Most children lose the wide-open dreams of childhood as they go through school. They hear that wanting to be a cowboy or an artist is not realistic. They hear that those are things you can do as hobbies but not things you can do to make a living. That’s because most children attend schools set up in a factory model, where everything is systematized and depersonalized. It’s an efficient delivery model for the service provider. It’s an extremely inefficient model for the service clients – our children.
Since the Montessori method encourages individual direction, it helps children explore their interests so they begin to recognize their natural gifts, talents, and passions. Since it encourages them to learn “how to learn” and deconstruct processes to see how things work, they learn how to figure things out and get them done. A child in an institutional model learns to follow a page of instructions to create a project to please one teacher. A child in a Montessori school learns how to think about the purpose of the project and the best way to communicate information to other people.
Children educated in an institutional model get used to the idea of finding a job that is defined in detail by someone else. They learn to look for the least restrictive or least annoying box or cubicle. They think ideas like living in the Caribbean and sailing around the islands is no way to make a real living, because they have no clue who will hire them to do that.
Children educated in the Montessori model are better able to understand that someone who loves sailing can come up with a way to design a business around it. They have been encouraged to develop elements of entrepreneurial thinking. They can more easily answer the question, “Who wants what I have to offer?” They are not daunted or cowed by the idea of starting their own business. They already know how to research things, deconstruct systems, and think about the best way to communicate to their audience. When they hear the true story of a person who owns a sailboat charter business in the Caribbean, working part of the year and sailing for fun the other part, they can believe it and identify with it.
People who go through the process of uncovering their natural gifts, talents, and passions to help them identify their calling – the work they were born to do – get to experience in adulthood what Montessori students experience in childhood. They think about the things they are naturally good at doing, the things that seem very easy to them but really impress other people. They think about the things that capture their interest so completely they become absorbed and lose track of time. They think about what they really love to do.
They get to set aside the expectation that they’ll find a not-too-unpleasant job-box and then give up a lot of their time to it, hoping they’ll earn enough money to enjoy their limited free time. They get to think about what they really want their life to be like. Instead of, “What do you want to be?” they ask, “Who do you want to be?” They define the values and purpose they want to express, and they find a way to bring their gifts, talents, passions, values, and purpose together in a life design that includes work that is meaningful and enjoyable.
Unfortunately, most of these adults were educated in institutional schools and then spent decades working in corporations and agencies. They don’t naturally explore things to learn about them and they aren’t skilled at deconstructing systems to figure out how they can do something on their own. They need help seeing from the point of view of self-direction.
Fortunately they have access to individual coaching, group coaching, mastermind groups, and support teams to help expand their vision, get encouragement, and figure out the steps to take to bring their vision to life. For people who climb out of the job-box, the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has a rich and powerful meaning. Fortunately, our Montessori kids are already learning to think this way.
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Steve Coxsey is a Personal Development Coach who advocates Authentic Living. He enjoys coaching, training, and writing on mentorship skills for parents, teachers, and other leaders; authentic life work and creative career choice; and self-employment and small business development. He and his wife have two sons, one in high school and one in elementary. Steve has written several articles for parents and those who work with children. They are available on his Blog-zine under the heading The Mentorship Approach With Kids & Teens .
