Frederick Hess
This week, we’ll be lighting the menorah a couple feet from the Christmas tree. Only in America.
Contemplating such moments always leaves me amazed by such blessings and how they have come by a combination of luck and hard-earned wisdom. In this instance, it brought to mind a slender book I had a chance to read earlier this fall.
Author Jeff Nelligan penned Four Lessons from My Three Sons to share his experiences trying to teach his kids “the basic universal virtues—civility, confidence, resilience and ambition.” You can’t get any more old school than that. It’s a book about parenting, but pretty much the whole of it applies equally to teaching and mentoring.
This is simple, sensible stuff. It feels to me like we don’t spend enough time nowadays on the simple, sensible stuff. We should spend more. Readers won’t find much that’s surprising, but they’ll find good sense, encouragement, and some useful nuggets.
Nelligan starts with a simple but oft-confounding question: “How do you get a kid to pay attention?” Schools pay experts and professional trainers a lot of money for answers to that question. But I suspect Nelligan’s pithy advice may frequently prove more useful.
Recognizing that kids are going to roll their eyes at parental lectures, Nelligan suggests pointing out specific examples of good and bad behavior as we see them unfold in real time. He tells of one such experience while leaving a football field with his boys. They watched one of the players walk off, with his dad carrying his equipment bag and his mom carrying his helmet, while the boy walked “ten feet ahead . . . texting furiously on a cell phone.” Nelligan’s advice to his kids? “Don’t ever be like that jackass.”
In an era when sensitivity to feelings may leave some parents hesitant to be this blunt, Nelligan reminds us that life requires us to constantly make judgments, big and small. He urges parents (and teachers) to accept that and then be present, principled, and clear in those judgments. Indeed, he argues that the basics of good conduct are simple. As he puts it, “There’s no intellect necessary in looking into someone’s eyes when you speak with them. There’s no expertise needed in shaking hands with an adult and saying Mr., Mrs., or Ms. . . . These are the easiest, simplest tasks there are.”
When encouraging his kids to be aware of the world around them, Nelligan drills them with questions. I’ve been known to do something similar, and I quite liked his suggestions: “How many people in this grocery store do you see wearing college sweatshirts? How many people are working as waiters in this restaurant? How many out-of-state license plates do you see in this parking lot?”
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Nelligan describes seizing opportunities to reinforce fundamental principles. Like me, he’s a big believer in timeliness—and that anything other than a respect for punctuality suggests to others that your time is more valuable than theirs. (My kids have heard me give this little homily many times. Maybe that’s why Nelligan’s take on this gave me a chuckle.) He tells of a time a family showed up disruptively late to a school event. Afterward, the family meandered over to him, with the father explaining, “We were late getting here because we’re always so damn busy.” Nelligan’s response, in front of his sons? “Yeah, I hear you. Good thing the Nelligans are never busy.”
There are sensible tips to building a kid’s self-assurance and sense of competence. When his boys were little, Nelligan would tell them: “You guys are small so if you get lost somewhere in a bunch of people, look for that guy with a stripe running down their pants. That’s a policeman or a solider and they’ll help you out.” When his five-year-old got lost at a mall, he stared at legs until he found a mall security officer.
The volume is hit-or-miss. Some anecdotes fall flat. But it’s an engaging, provocative contribution. As Nelligan puts it, he wrote this book “with an edge because after 20 years in Parent World, I know that parenting in this increasingly erratic and questionable culture demands hard and direct truths, not soft-pedalled equivocation.”
That’s a pretty fair summation of both the book and the need for an old-school approach to education.
Wishing all of you a merry Christmas, a happy Chanukah, and a terrific 2025.
Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”
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Frederick Hess
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Vol. 24, No. 4
Fall 2024
Vol. 24, No. 4
Education Next is a journal of opinion and research about education policy.
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