In many localities in the United States, schools remain closed for in-person learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic (although momentum seems to be building for reopening). Even where schools have generally been open, like here in rural Ohio, there have been other challenges: repeated blankets of snow have kept the kids home for a large part of the winter. The absence of in-person learning has led many to worry about the long-term effects on students’ academic progress, and researchers are monitoring the situation to assess the damage that might be done. But education is about more than academic subjects, and we should be paying equal attention to the importance of providing opportunities for fostering the attitudes and skills that are necessary for maturing persons to pursue productive, meaningful lives.
Schooling, when done properly, cultivates those traits: discipline, reliability, consistency, persistence, collaboration, willingness to learn and adapt. Institutional schools are of course not the only means of inculcating such virtues; families are the primary and irreplaceable training ground. But schools can and often do furnish an important auxiliary service in cultivating the values that are planted in the home. In exceptional situations, schools and their personnel serve as replacements for the family life that is lacking or dysfunctional. When schools function as surrogates in this way, it is inherently an imperfect and second-best approach—but second-best is better than nothing.
Classrooms are not the only or perhaps even the most important venue for schools’ role in promoting these essential personal qualities. Extracurricular activities—one of the collateral casualties of school closings—can be extremely valuable in this regard. Mock trial and debate clubs; dramatic productions and music programs; math and science competitions; athletic teams and social and charitable associations—all contribute immensely to building and practicing responsibility, teamwork, and determination. FVI’s own Self-Reliance Clubs, which have also been hampered by school closings, are an outstanding example of the potential of extracurricular programs to contribute to the educational mission in ways that may be neglected or impossible in most classroom settings.en
The repercussions of failing to develop positive personal capacities during children’s formative period are wide-ranging and monumental. Employers have been complaining for years about the difficulty of finding qualified candidates—the problem being for the most part not the lack of academic qualifications or technical expertise, but instead a deficit in the “soft skills” of communication, timeliness, and organization. These are abilities whose development is, again, crucially connected to a health family life; but school-based clubs and teams also excel at fostering them.
A failure to develop these traits extends beyond employment and financial matters. The same qualities that make for a successful employee also make for a successful mother or father, nonprofit board president or soup kitchen volunteer. Prospering families and communities are dependent on a critical mass of people who have a combination of awareness of social obligations and the capacity to meet them.
Louis Zamperini, the remarkable man behind the bestseller Unbroken and its film adaptation, overcame an adolescent rebellious streak by dedicating himself to high school track. “One thing you learn in sports,” he later reflected: “You don’t give up; you fight to the finish.” It was a lesson he applied to extreme situations, surviving plane crashes, shark attacks, and prison camps during World War II. His is an extraordinary case, but similar, less spectacular examples could be adduced and multiplied.
Meetings and other group events held virtually have some value along these lines, but they can’t come close to achieving the results equal to those offered by in-person activities. Youth need extracurricular opportunities to come together, guided by elders, to reach common aims by collaborating and taking responsibility for their own parts in the enterprise. The classroom is essential, but the track, the stage, and the garden are educational sites too. They are all places—real places—where young people gather and learn, give and take, fail and succeed. They are places where the character of the next generation is shaped.
