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2. Competency and Agency
The rationale for increasing student agency is based on the roles that we now carry out in everyday life. Increasingly, over the last 25–30 years, most of us have taken greater levels of agency over our lives, and rather than being managed in our workplace and social places, we are primarily managing ourselves. Self-management requires us to make decisions about our needs and the needs of those whom we have at least partial responsibility for. This shift in culture is by no means a global one, but it is increasingly becoming so. 171
Learned Uselessness
As well as having an upside regarding a greater level of self-determination, increased agency also requires us to be responsible for our self, and ensure that we also empower the next generation with this capability set. By empowering learners to take agency over their world in school, learners are better prepared for their future where they will be required to take that same agency over that world in their working, social and familial lives.
The notion of the child ‘being seen and not heard’, has shifted in many cultures, but the pendulum has swung passed the equilibrium point and we are now seeing young people taking the ‘upper hand’ in the child-parent relationship. Too often young children are being indulged to a point where we are now increasingly seeing cases of ‘learned uselessness’. This is not ‘agency’, but dependency, and as such it needs to be urgently addressed. As educators, parents or caregivers, we are not helping our children and learners by giving them everything they want or even need, and schools are dealing with the results of that approach to parenting.
If our young people are constantly active, bouncing from one parent or caregiver-initiated activity to the next, they never have the time to reflect on what they feel or why they feel the way they do, and why they do what they do. The non-intended outcome of this managed busyness is that the child does not build agency over their world or learn to solve the important issues and problems in life.
Boredom is often a driver for creativity when we are young, and this encourages us to create our own fun, new opportunities and activities and take agency over aspects of our world. If our young people are constantly active, bouncing from one activity to the next, they never have the time to reflect on their world, and they never have time to daydream, to wonder or imagine. Because of these shifts, our young people are missing an essential aspect of their childhood.
It is imperative that in our childhood we experience time on our own and allow our mind to wander, powered by our imagination. It is through these conversations with our self that we begin to come to terms, as best as we can, with who we are and who we think we might become.
Technological devices are also playing into this worrying trend. Even when our young people do have time on their own, they are checking their ‘likes’, Snapchat, text messages, phone calls, as well as reaching out to ‘friends’. This lack of quiet time when they could simply reflect on who they are and ask the big questions in life, is potentially hindering their capacity to make wise decisions and reflect and review their attitudes, qualities and values.
171 The chapter 24 summary video can be found here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdDdj3otDXk&t=4s if you are reading the book, otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
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