Some words about cleanliness and personal responsibility

We all want to raise children with a sense of responsibility. In general, when our children reach a certain age, we want them to clean their room/home, prepare their own food, wash their own clothes and generally live their own lives, without us having to help them too much.

Still, in the vast majority of public schools in Israel and the United States, the children are not responsible for cleanliness and organization. They don’t mop the floors, they don’t vacuum the carpets, they don’t empty the garbage bins and they don’t even handle the garbage they themselves generate during the day. It is amazing, in my opinion, that in 2019 these tasks are done for the children by other people, who are much older than these children and usually earn the minimum wage and work for many hours to clean up after children who have no physical impediment to cleaning up after themselves.

The fact that the Eagles at Acton are entirely responsible for the cleanliness of the studio is one of the facts I like and appreciate the most. Here is an example from last week: Because the weather was very cold, the art class was held in the studio. The Eagles used many different materials: leaves, branches and soil that they have collected, hot glue, acrylic paints, cardboards, pompons, foam boards and more. The studio, which is usually a fairly neat place, turned into an art studio after ten minutes with a variety of materials scattered on the carpet and the Eagles lying in the middle of them and creating. At the end of the day, we had “Studio maintenance” for fifteen minutes: within this time the whole studio was spotless! This included picking up and putting the equipment back in its place, vacuuming, rearranging the tables and chairs and of course all the regular actions of setting up the computers to charge, returning the books to the library, making sure the toilets are flushed with no paper on the floor and putting all the equipment back in its place. In fifteen minutes, five Eagles did a job that, in my opinion, would have taken an adult two hours, maybe more.

There are fifteen minutes for studio maintenance every day in the schedule, and not in vain: The idea is to turn this habit into second nature. Through these fifteen minutes in the schedule, the Eagles acquire the super important habit of cleaning up after themselves. At the same time, they learn an instructive lesson in personal responsibility: How important it is to put used equipment back in its place and bring the studio back to being a pleasant place to be in.

If I could adopt only one thing from Acton to any educational system in the world, that would be it.