How to Foster Children’s Resilience While They Wait for Schools to Improve

By Maurice J. Elias

How do we help disadvantaged youths remain resilient and hopeful while the long-term efforts of school reform proceed around them? Lost in many of the discussions about school reform is the impact of troubled schools on students who are unlikely to benefit a great deal from the changes being debated, planned, or initiated. Theodore R. Sizer, among others, has noted that students are watching and waiting for the adults around them to take the steps necessary to transform their educational surroundings. What can we do meanwhile?

The work of the psychologist James W. Pennebaker and the wisdom of the late philanthropist and financier Sir John Templeton may provide some answers. Pennebaker has found in his research that people facing chronic difficulties in their lives, such as traumatic losses or injuries, benefit greatly from telling stories about their experiences and feelings. In fact, a number of research studies have validated the fact that writing about difficult circumstances is therapeutic for those unable to change what they must live through.

Independent of Pennebaker’s work, Templeton came to believe that young people in our culture are influenced in so many ways, and from so many sources, that they have difficulty establishing a coherent set of guiding principles for living. Yet Templeton, who was a man of great spiritual belief and optimism, also felt most young people were getting positive messages from the caring adults around them, and just needed a vehicle for tuning in to their own deepest understandings. Thus, he created the Laws of Life essay, which provides students with an opportunity to write about the values and guiding moral principles through which...