John MacDonald: What's wrong with letting kids be kids?

Let kids be kids.

That’s what I thought when I read about a very successful young guy with 12 university degrees, who thinks we need to be pushing Kiwi kids harder from a younger age.

Jamie Beaton is co-founder of Crimson Education, which helps Kiwi students get into the top universities around the world.

Sir John Key is Crimson’s chairman. It’s done very well, with a capital value of $1 billion.

But I don’t like what Jamie Beaton is saying about pushing kids harder.

The way he puts it is that we need to “crank up the intensity” for kids 12 and older.

He thinks we let them cruise through school and we make it too easy for them to get into university. And, instead, we should be bringing up kids the way they do in places like Singapore.

Where kids have to compete to get into university and, from a young age, are very driven.

Jamie Beaton says: “Kids are hustling from 12, 13, 14 to study for these exams, build their leadership skills, launch different projects, do community service, and the incentives actually make the child very motivated.”

Is that really the ideal? I don’t think so.

He goes on: “I would much rather Kiwis be 12, 13 and hustling, motivated, ambitious, trying things, competing and striving, than just going to school and watching the clock hit 3:30 and going off and using TikTok.”

But here’s where I’m at. The world kids live in is stressful enough and what do you think would happen with things like anxiety levels if we went down the route Jamie Beaton is pushing for?

In an age where we’re all talking about adults having work-life balance, why on earth would we want to force our kids from the age of 12 to use every hour God sends them doing this and doing that?

Besides which, the way he’s talking, you would think there are no teenagers in this country out there doing amazing things.

There are truckloads of them. You go to any major school sporting event. Find out more about things like the Young Enterprise Scheme, where school students get to start businesses and learn all sorts of skills.

So the opportunities are there for these kids, if that’s what they want to do. But sometimes, even the really motivated kids find that they have limits and can’t keep pushing themselves.

Which is why this talk about forcing kids from the age of 12 to hustle and compete, get into university and do community service and everything else, is the last thing our young people need.

It is the complete opposite of letting kids be kids.

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