There’s a beach close by my home called Safety Beach.
You can walk 100 metres out and the water’s still only at your hips. It’s safe. Predictable. Risk-free.
And it’s pretty boring.
It’s not where you go to surf, snorkel or feel invigorated. It’s where you go to not drown.
Too many schools have become Safety Beach.
In our obsession with safety – physical, emotional and social – we’ve drained the challenge and discomfort out of school life. In too many instances we’ve made school calm, controlled and utterly uninspiring.
We call it “duty of care,” or sometimes even “trauma-informed” or “zero tolerance,” but too often that’s just code for fear. We’ve become utterly terrified of conflict, parent complaints, unpredictability and criticism from unqualified pundits.
So, we bubble-wrap our students. We let them redo every task. We script every conversation. We cancel the rough-edged stuff – the debates, the competitions, the confronting tasks – because someone might get upset.
And then we wonder why persistence, resilience and courage are vanishing.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth’s work on grit tells us the opposite of safety isn’t danger. It’s growth. Kids get stronger when they struggle and recover, not when we save them from the waves.
Yes, safety matters. But in moderation only.
It’s a truly inconvenient truth that the safest schools in Australia are often the least inspiring.
It’s time to let kids wade out further. We should let them fall, argue, lose, apologise and then try again. Let them learn they can stand back up.
The safest beach in the world isn’t where you learn to swim.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. Ever feel like you’ve got to pick a side – Direct Instruction or the relational stuff? Well, you don’t.
When you get instruction and relationships working in tandem, classrooms calm down, engagement lifts and achievement actually grows.
We’ve put together a few new tools to help teachers make that happen – including a whitepaper and a new podcast series with Real Schools experts Brenda Quayle, Trish Coelho, and yours truly.
Explore them here: Teaching in Technicolour.
Want to subscribe to Adam’s Home Truths? Simply subscribe here.