I spent Sunday afternoon through Tuesday morning of this week at the National Coalition of Girls School Global Forum 2016. This event gathered over 900 mostly women and some committed men from 22 countries to talk about educating girls. We are accustomed at NCGS events to welcoming our sisters from Canada, the UK, Australia and South Africa, but a far broader array of countries sent representatives this time – even Azerbaijan. Moreover, we heard keynote speakers from the UK, the Philippines, Spain, Kenya, and Australia as well as the US. The conference was jam packed with sessions on a wide range of topics that taken together with the large, international assemblage made it feel like more than a gathering of like-minded educators. It felt like a movement, with all the fervor and energy associated with that word.
A movement embodies a cause and this is a lofty one: making the world a better place. When you educate girls, you empower them; you change the trajectories of families, communities and countries; you prepare them to take a seat at the table and once they're at the table, they change the conversation. In some places, we just need to get girls in school. Worldwide, 62 million girls are not in school who should be. In other places, like the U.S. and much of the rest of the developed world, we need to make sure we're educating them in ways that truly prepare and inspire them to assume the leadership the world so badly needs from them. Whether we're talking about Kenya or Kensington, we need to educate girls well not just because they deserve it, but because, as one of our faculty members said last fall, "Literate, critical thinking women change the world."
Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, the founder of the Kakenya Center for Excellence, a girls primary boarding school in her village in Kenya, someone familiar to us at Holton where she spoke last fall, and Melissa Hillebrenner, the Director of Girl Up, "the United Nations Foundation's adolescent girl campaign," reminded us of what's at stake for those whom Girl Up describes as "the hardest to reach girls living in places where it is hardest to be a girl." Education, which can allow girls to avoid child marriage and contributing to the high maternal mortality rates associated with young adolescent pregnancy, truly can be a matter of life and death for these girls. Dr. Ntaiya herself reminds us of the power of educating a girl: she has taken her own education and leveraged it to provide an education for hundreds more girls.
Ntaiya and Hillebrenner act according to what Dr. Nuria Chinchilla, professor at the IESE Business School at the University of Navarro, Spain, terms transcendent motivations. Chinchilla argues that we are motivated by intrinsic, extrinsic, or transcendent motives, the last defined as being useful and helping others. One builds a workplace that promotes transcendent motives by nurturing interdependent talent and managing by needs, the needs of others, colleagues, clients, etc. This kind of environment builds a sense of teamwork and transcendent motivation, leading to collaboration and ultimately to exemplary results. This approach, Chinchilla would argue, plays to women's strengths, or "femininity," one of the four F's she believes we must promote to achieve success in the caring economy. The others are flexibility; family – we cannot, she says, "keep working as if people were isolated individuals"; and faith, faith in our in our projects, institutions, and in our ability to make the right decisions. Basically, Chinchilla believes that success in today's world demands that we create organizations and ultimately an economy that acknowledge women's interests and incorporate women's ways of thinking and working.
Already focused on female interests as well as ways of thinking and working, girls schools offer environments in which girls can hone leadership skills that will position them to contribute to society in the ways Chinchilla hopes. However, for girls to be successful they need a solid emotional footing. St. Catherine's School in Waverley, New South Wales, Australia decided to address the high levels of depression and anxiety among adolescent girls directly and positively by creating an integrated social and emotional curriculum based on positive psychology. Through this program, they help their girls develop positive emotions, engagement, strong relationships, meaning and purpose, and a sense of accomplishment, the characteristics identified by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman as the keys to well-being, or, as he puts it, "flourishing." Beginning with five-year-olds, St. Catherine's helps their students identify ways in which their own biases or thought patterns may stand in the way of clear thinking; they build gratitude and optimism through "Hunt the Good Stuff Journals" that the girls and teachers keep and analyze together; they focus on specific steps such as discussing problems assertively and praising effectively that help build strong relationships. They draw on the work of Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth to construct growth mindsets and grit. The high rates of mental illness among college students, particularly high performing ones, demonstrate that overall success demands more than academic achievement. The St. Catherine's administration understands their students need to learn how to achieve social and emotional well-being
Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out and Curse of the Good Girl, would completely agree. She worries about what she calls "Effortless Perfection," the feeling girls have that they have to be perfect in every domain, but appear to achieve this perfection without exerting any effort. Effortless perfection takes an enormous toll on girls, causing high levels of stress, an intense fear of failure, and unwillingness to ask for help because it would signal weakness, all of which lead to ruminating (chewing issues over and over in their minds), as well as anxiety and depression. I've talked about all of these issues in other columns, particularly through the work of Madeline Levine, and the problems are real. While these girls may appear to be overachieving on the outside, what is happening below the surface is decidedly unhealthy, and frequently leads to burn out or worse. For these very talented girls to realize their full potentials, we need to help them blunt their self-criticism and open themselves up to the value of mistakes. They need the kind of curriculum that St. Catherine's has created.
Castilleja School in Palo-Alto likewise recognizes the mental health issues plaguing too many adolescent girls, and they have also developed a comprehensive social and emotional curriculum. However, they have taken it a step farther and tied their global education and leadership programs to social-emotional learning. They have identified three qualities that undergird successful leadership: initiative, agility, and purpose. Castilleja students develop these qualities in an intentional and self-reflective way beginning in middle school and culminating in international experiences very similar to our Junior Journeys. However, they also recognize that these qualities all contain social and emotional aspects that need nurturing. So they have framed the social-emotional curriculum, which, by the way they have created in consultation with Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, in the context of leadership. A person with self-understanding and the capacity for self-reflection and personal growth will make a far more effective leader, especially when operating in realms that demand flexibility and sensitivity to others (which is really all realms, but especially cross-cultural ones), than people who lack those qualities.
Arianna Huffington agrees. After years of pushing herself to the limit and watching her daughter succumb to drug addiction while an undergraduate at Yale, Huffington has become a vocal advocate for physical and emotional well-being. She urges us to disconnect from our devices; she commands us to get more sleep, siting the research, also discussed in this column, that attributes many mental health issues such as depression to sleep deprivation; and she argues that we need to change the way work operates. While she sites statistics showing greater risk for heart disease and diabetes among high achieving women than men, she wryly observes that the current system "isn't working for women, it isn't working for men; it's only working for pall bearers." It creates too many "silent casualties." "Personal well-being," she argues, "is the key to success."
If, as Gloria Steinem, whose call to action opened the conference, believes, we sit at the inflection point between maximum danger and maximum hope, the hope rests with these girls around the world, girls eager to act on their hope for a better future. Their potential defies measurement, but it will only be realized if we can get them educated, and educated not just academically but socially and emotionally. Armed with such comprehensive training, they can tap into their own and others' transcendent motives. That's the movement: understanding and implementing the steps necessary to prepare these girls to grow into women who will change the world. The future depends on it.