Resilience in High School Students: Can They Obtain It?

Anyone who works with teenagers on a regular basis will report the divide between those who have resilience and those who don’t. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as:

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.

The question poses itself: if some people aren’t resilient, can those people become resilient? Mary Pipher writes:

Resilience is not a fixed trait and we can master the skill of resilience in the same ways we learn to cook, drive, or do yoga. Growth isn’t inevitable.

Those who don’t develop resilience will “remain locked in their smallest selves cosseted by blankets of familiar but outdated ideas,” or,

Others wither emotionally over time and deal with life’s many body blows by becoming more isolated and self-involved.

In an educational setting, resilience is the ability to focus one’s self on one’s work, even if the last piece of work went badly, and even if this piece of work isn’t easy, or isn’t likely to be completed perfectly.

Resilience is the ability to override one’s emotions and direct one’s self to one’s duty — to get the job done — to “just do it,” in the words of the famous advertising slogan.

Public Conversation about Education: Not Reserved for the Specialists

If a society gives more than mere lip service to the concept of democracy, it must tolerate and even encourage open discussion about a variety of issues, including education. All the more so if members of the general public are themselves educated.

In a democratic society, there is a tension between the specialist and the general public. Technical expertise is valuable and valued, yet the resource people with these professional skills should not become exclusive or elitist. Educators possess insights corresponding to their work, but many citizens who work in other fields are capable of analyzing these insights.

Sadly, some educators individually, and the education establishment as a whole, exude an aura of elitism: author Mortimer Smith reports that “one such” leader

among the educators, referring to arguments carried on by “the nonprofessional part of society” about “the character of the skills and the methods of teaching them,” says loftily that “in reality this is not the business of society at large, any more than the kinds of prescriptions doctors give to patients should be a matter of public discussion.” (In other words, the message of the educator to the parent concerned about what should be taught and how it should be taught, is this: Mind your own business.) This unfortunately is not simply a case of individual, eccentric arrogance; the American Association of School Administrators makes precisely the same point in their claim that school board members are no more competent to pass on curriculum matters “than the patient’s family can pass on the scientific details of the doctor’s treatment.”

Such behavior merely fuels suspicions among the public that the ordinary citizens are being managed or handled, and are not part of a truly democratic dialogue about education.

Smith introduces a comparison between education and medicine. Just as a healthcare practitioner explains a diagnosis and various treatment options to a patient, so an educator should explain various alternatives to students and parents. Just as patients should be given maximum information and empowered to make as many choices as possible, so also schools should inform and defer to the decision-making of students, parents, and the community at large.