Speaker 1: Adam voitz On nine is a former principle and founder
Speaker 1: of Real Schools, a key national education body is calling
Speaker 1: for kindness. Milseye something could learn classes in schools to
Speaker 1: teach children how to be more resilient than empathetic and
Speaker 1: help prevent bullying.
Speaker 2: Good morning, Adam, how are you morning jents?
Speaker 3: Can you really teach someone to be empathetic?
Speaker 2: No, you can't. So in this situation, it's a classic
Speaker 2: example of the right intention our kids are. They're lacking
Speaker 2: in kindness, they're lacking in empathy, they're lacking in compassion.
Speaker 2: But the way to get that done is not to
Speaker 2: have teachers mandated to run a kindness lesson on a
Speaker 2: Wednesday afternoon. I end up giving a really good mark
Speaker 2: to a kid for a really fabulous kindness poster, and
Speaker 2: they watch that kid go out of the yard and
Speaker 2: belt someone over their head with a rolls up kindness poster.
Speaker 2: They get better at posters, not at kindness. Kindness is
Speaker 2: something you learn in context, and if we want to
Speaker 2: solve that problem, we need to put our energy.
Speaker 3: So the best way to teach kindness is to be
Speaker 3: kind exactly.
Speaker 2: And so what we need to do is to ask ourselves.
Speaker 2: How do you build kind young people? And they build
Speaker 2: it in company of other people. So to be really honest,
Speaker 2: if we're going to be spending money on trying to
Speaker 2: build kind kids, I would be sending an unbuilt Billy
Speaker 2: carts to every family in Australia and telling them that
Speaker 2: they get their tax break if they can send a
Speaker 2: video in of their kid and other kids building and
Speaker 2: using that old billy card. You learn it from the
Speaker 2: thousands of hours you get in the Argie barge. You're
Speaker 2: getting things right and wrong. Schools can plain an important
Speaker 2: role in that, but outsourcing it to a lesson on
Speaker 2: kindness is frankly an exercising futility.
Speaker 3: Actually, he rose a very good point. I think of
Speaker 3: my development as a person, and I was lucky enough
Speaker 3: I had good, strong parents. But I learned a lot
Speaker 3: from my friendship group and interacting with their families and
Speaker 3: their brothers and their sisters, and even to this day
Speaker 3: they're a major part of my life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an enormous cumulative task to become a kind
Speaker 2: person or a compassionate person, and there are contributions made
Speaker 2: by like you said, by his family, and sometimes there's variability.
Speaker 2: Some families do it better than others. It's true you
Speaker 2: learn it around the dinner table, but you learn it
Speaker 2: in the street as well by having those hundreds it's
Speaker 2: not thousands of hours with your friends who don't always
Speaker 2: treat you really well. And that's where you actually pick
Speaker 2: up the resilience bit as well. But our kids aren't there.
Speaker 2: They're not in the street, you know, they're in lound
Speaker 2: rooms and they're on their phones. And so we've got
Speaker 2: to actually replace that with the opportunity to be face
Speaker 2: to face with authentic, meaty people if we really want
Speaker 2: to build kindness in young people. Because this pattern of
Speaker 2: like outsourcing it to a mini lesson at a school,
Speaker 2: actually invites some stuff we don't want. One it squeezes
Speaker 2: out that of the learning time until it invites these
Speaker 2: kind of either parent or state funded morality lessons coming
Speaker 2: into our schools that nobody really is in favor of.
Speaker 3: Ith I agree with that either. I think back to
Speaker 3: my group of friends and though would stick out for
Speaker 3: our minds, but they'll give you a lot of stick as.
Speaker 2: Well, exactly. And so how do you become resilient. It's
Speaker 2: not by learning about resilience. It's not by making a
Speaker 2: buraal about it. It's not through a theme day where
Speaker 2: we get everyone out on the oval and get them
Speaker 2: and spell out the word say no to bully so
Speaker 2: that a drone can take a photo for our Instagram.
Speaker 2: You learn in this discomfort and in schools. So there's
Speaker 2: a lesson we can learn for this in schools. And
Speaker 2: there are schools around the country at the moment worried
Speaker 2: about lunchtime that a lot of things go wrong at lunchtime.
Speaker 2: It all goes wrong in the last ten minutes, so
Speaker 2: they're trimming ten minutes off lunchtime. They actually need that
Speaker 2: time about ten minutes where things are a bit ugly
Speaker 2: at lunchtime, it's actually good stuff. That's where the kids
Speaker 2: are learn We need to learn how to help them
Speaker 2: learn in that situation. Stop expecting it to be perfect
Speaker 2: and stop expecting them to be safe all the time.
Speaker 1: More playtime, I reckon, Adam, more playtime.
Speaker 2: I totally agree. I think it's Simon will actually let
Speaker 2: them be face to face and let them get dirty them,
Speaker 2: let them have a little a little bit of things
Speaker 2: going wrong, let them learn how to get over it.
Speaker 2: That's how they get the job done.
Speaker 3: Good on you, my founder of Real Schools, Adam Vought,
Speaker 3: a former principal, learned. I think he's got his hand
Speaker 3: on that particular topic with a lot of fine grips.