It helps form their inner worlds, their relationships with other people, and their capacity to participate responsibly in a democratic community.
During more than 40 years of ministry, I have worked with children, families, people struggling with addiction, and people passing through divorce, grief, trauma, and other major life transitions. I have created community-education projects, seminars, and groups to help people understand these experiences and respond to them constructively. I know that community education works — for adults as well as children.
I also know that education has a psychosocial and developmental dimension. Every educational environment affects a child’s emerging sense of self, relationship with others, and understanding of the world. Educational policy must therefore consider not only what children are taught, but also what emotional and relational capacities are being strengthened.
Development does not proceed according to an exact timetable, and children mature in different ways and at different rates. Nevertheless, three broad developmental movements should inform educational thinking throughout Vermont.
1. Integrating good and difficult experience
During early childhood, children gradually learn that a loving parent, caregiver, teacher, or friend can sometimes meet their needs and sometimes disappoint them — and still remain the same whole person.
At first, a young child may experience these as separate emotional realities: the “good” person who provides comfort and the “bad” person who frustrates, withdraws, or says no. Healthy development involves bringing these experiences together. The child gradually discovers that people are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Love can survive frustration, disagreement, and imperfection.
Schools should support this integration. Education should not divide the world into perfectly good people and wholly bad people, or teach children that discomfort must always be expelled or assigned to an enemy. It should help children tolerate complexity, manage anxiety, repair relationships, and recognize the whole person — including themselves.
2. Nurturing concern for the other
During the elementary years, children’s natural capacity for empathy can develop into a deeper and more sustained concern for other people.
This is more than learning to perform a polite act or help when someone is visibly hurt. It is the growing ability to recognize that another person has an inner life, needs, fears, hopes, and dignity of their own. It includes the capacity to understand how one’s actions affect others and to participate in repairing harm.
Schools should intentionally nurture this concern through cooperation, caregiving, conflict resolution, shared projects, contact with the natural world, and meaningful participation in community life. Concern for the other is not an optional addition to education. It is a foundation of mental health, intimate relationships, democratic citizenship, and peaceful community life.
3. Developing reflective thought and self-agency
Around early adolescence, generally between the ages of 12 and 14, young people develop a greater capacity for abstract thought. They begin examining beliefs, recognizing patterns, considering several perspectives, and asking who they will become in relation to the surrounding world.
At this stage, education should help students move beyond simply becoming characters in stories handed to them by adults. They should learn to step back from a story, examine how it was constructed, identify whose experience is included or excluded, and understand the historical, economic, cultural, and emotional forces shaping it.
This is the appropriate period for a sustained and connected study of world history. Younger children can encounter age-appropriate stories about different peoples, places, and traditions. But as abstract thought matures, students should study history as a continuous human narrative rather than as disconnected episodes or competing accounts of heroes and enemies.
Students should learn to:
- Compare different historical perspectives.
- Distinguish evidence from interpretation and propaganda.
- Understand how land, economics, religion, government, and culture interact.
- Recognize the humanity of people on every side of a conflict.
- Examine inherited beliefs without being required to accept or reject them.
- Develop their own responsible moral judgment.
- Consider both their own growth and the life and growth of others.
The purpose is not to tell young people what political identity to adopt. It is to strengthen their capacity to think, care, reflect, and choose responsibly.
I will work to make these three developmental principles conscious considerations in educational policy across Vermont. They should inform curriculum development, teacher preparation, school climate, conflict resolution, history education, and the evaluation of proposed educational mandates.
This does not mean imposing a psychological theory on every classroom. It means asking a basic question of every educational policy: Does this help children integrate complexity, develop concern for others, and become reflective people capable of responsible self-direction?