Perspectives on Childhood, Education and Parenting: Seventh and Eighth Grades Are Critical Educational Years

Perspectives on Childhood, Education and Parenting: Seventh and Eighth Grades Are Critical Educational Years

By Tom Northrup

Author’s Note: I wrote this column for Country ZEST in 2019, several months before school programs and children’s lives were disrupted by Covid-19. During the past two years, few would dispute that the education (academic and social-emotional) of children has suffered. My life and professional experience inform me that academic achievement is more likely to occur when children feel respected, listened to, truly known by the adults in their lives.

In his book “Social—Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect,” Matthew Lieberman, a Harvard trained, UCLA professor of psychology, writes that, “My belief is that junior high holds the key to our educational woes….(the students) are between the ages of twelve and fourteen.”

It’s a good reminder for all of us.

Tom Northrup

Have you ever heard that the seventh and eighth grades hold “the key to our educational woes?” I had not. Nevertheless, I’ve long understood the importance of keeping children interested in coming to school during these years. Designing and implementing a program to achieve this goal has been a major part of my life’s work.

Lieberman argues that our need to connect with others is as fundamental as our need for food and shelter. In his final chapter, “Educating the Social Brain,” he explains how today’s schools have failed in meeting this requirement, and offers practical suggestions.

Lieberman asserts one reason “academic performance and interest drop in junior high….(is that) the need to belong, our most basic social motivation, is not being met.” The increased emphasis on high stakes achievement testing in evaluating not only the students, but the quality of the teachers and schools, he believes, is misguided— especially in those middle school years.

“Through the latest research in the social brain,” he wrote, “we know that it isn’t the students’ fault that they are distracted by the social world….the social interest of adolescents is no distraction. Rather it is the most important (channel through which) they can learn well.” The challenge for educators is “to stop making the social brain the enemy during class time and figure out how to engage (it).”

One suggestions is to place students in leadership roles such as having them tutor younger students.

When they’re given the responsibility to teach and mentor, these adolescents perform at a high level. Providing such meaningful and authentic opportunities on a regular basis promotes their sense of belonging. Of truly being needed.

These students will be motivated to prepare and to learn the material they will be teaching. The prospect of social embarrassment in the presence of a younger person provides a strong incentive.

There are other benefits which contribute to future academic success and psychological health. These student mentors develop a sense of competence based on their performance. It’s earned. This invariably feels good, and reinforces the desire to prepare and to learn. The mentors also serve as role models the younger students are inspired to emulate as they grow older—a healthy self-perpetuating cycle.

After reading Social, I reflected on my years at Hamilton Junior High School in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The memories of walking (often hitchhiking) to and from school each day with a friend, of a surprise birthday party organized by my first girlfriend, and of competing on the school football, basketball, and track teams—are vivid and powerful. To this day, they evoke strong feelings, and these experiences taught me a great deal.