FEAR should not lead learning
As we start the new term, if there's one piece of advice I'd give both teachers and students: never let fear guide you. And more strongly for education leaders: don't use fear as a teaching tool.
Fear is a treacherous advisor. Fear blots out the beautiful. Fear starves creativity. And fear turns all the alarm clocks to NOW, preventing long term thinking. Fear asks us to sacrifice wellbeing - your own and that of everyone else, for its sake.
We know the science of learning here. Positive emotions broaden our cognitive resources and mental flexibility, while negative emotions like fear and anxiety narrow our attention and can suppress creativity. Anxiety activates our stimulus-driven, threat-focused attention system undermining open-ended thinking. In other words: when we are afraid, our minds narrow to the threat in front of us. We act to survive but we don't create. Our critical thinking narrows. And creative thinking is key to human joy, to human wellbeing.
This is a plea to teachers and parents to avoid using fear as a 'motivator' - threatening failure, threatening punishment. I have already heard from a couple of students who have had their first day assembly filled with 'you will fail if you do not... we will punish you if you...' Having kids fear you, think of you as a policing force, rather than a collaborator in their learning journey is destructive. They will not seek help from someone they fear. They are more likely to hide problems until it is too late.
Your job is to understand individual problems and systemic issues in order to help resolve them. Fearful young people will not trust you with their concerns and much less discuss what is happening around them. Without this communication we cannot understand what is happening, you cannot help them.
Instead of fear, we need to lead with hope. Not naive optimism. Hope isn't a guarantee that things will work. Some students will struggle. Some plans will fail. But hope is a precondition for trying in the first place: asking questions, taking risks, trying. Fear buys you short-term compliance. But it destroys agency and motivation. Hope supports wellbeing and joy.
I tell my students, and everyone I lead, the same thing: we work toward the best possible outcome, but even if we can't reach them, we can celebrate that the process will challenge and changes us: we will learn things we couldn't have planned for, we will build friendships, we will get sharper at the next problem. We will build skills that will help us build our world. This means we build from a place of hope rather than fear from the beginning. Whatever the result, we grow. That's what hope builds.
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