Food for Thought: Should we be advising our students to follow their passion?

Dear all,

This week's Food for Thought should make us think about the idea that has become quite popular of encouraging people/ students to follow their passion and they will be successful. What is interesting is that there is more and more research, articles and talks that would suggest this is not the best advice that we should be giving our students. What becomes clear in these studies is that there is far more to following your passion or in other words doing what you think you like most than at first meets the eye. Like most things we do at school there is a great deal of background thinking and development that needs to be undertaken before one is able to identify a true passion and one that one has the skills to follow successfully.

We often associate Sir Ken Robinson's book, The Element,  with an encouragement to follow our passion whereas in fact the book is about identifying/ uncovering your talents which will lead to having a passion that you will enjoy. When talking about undiscovered talents I always remember the story that Sir Ken and Sir John Jones tell about the High School that later became the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, and the fact that the then music teacher who taught Sir Paul McCartney and George Harrison, 50% of the Beatles, wrote school reports that said they had no musical talent.  Makes me think about how many students I may have misunderstood in my career. Anyway, here is a short video, 3 mins, in which Sir Ken talks about finding ones element.

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame,  raises some serious reservations in these two videos about advising people to follow their passion from his experience of working with people employed in over 200 different jobs. The first video is short. The Second is a TED which is quite humorous for the first 10 minutes talking about sheep rearing (castrating sheep) so if you don't fancy spoken imagery on this topic jump to around the 10 minute mark where he starts to talk about the idea of work and passion.

Reading and watching other articles and videos it is clear to me that we do need to develop a scope and sequence or at least a systematic approach to encouraging our students to discover their talents and then develop the skill necessary to follow their passion. We also need to recognize that it may not be their passion that they end up following but this is Ok as well. 

To end this week's Food for Thought I want to share this article, Why ‘Follow Your Passion’ Is Bad Advice, because it encourages the development of 7 habits, some of which we already think about in our classrooms, that which when applied to ideas like Google Hour, Think Tank Thursday, Passion Time need to be taken more seriously if we are going to be producing students who genuinely make the most of their talents and are successful in life.

Here is the conclusion to Why Follow Your Passion is bad Advice:

"Is passion a bad thing?

Understood rightly, no. But as the be-all-and-end-all? Yes.

Cal Newport’s prescription was skill: passion is the result of excellence, not it’s source.

Far from a magic bullet, passion can mislead us, blind us, and even turn us in on ourselves. Newport was right: “‘Follow your passion’ might just be terrible advice.” Thankfully, these seven habits put passion in its place so that the fire Jobs spoke of doesn’t burn out … but endures."

Have a good Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

The great thing about blogs is that you can add extra stimulation and so here is an additional TED related to multipotentials that i shared before but fits well with the idea of following your passion. simply what happens if you are multi talented and therefore don't just have one area of interest.