Who holds the whistle

On sports day at most schools in Jeddah, the adults run everything. A teacher picks the teams, a teacher sets the order, a teacher blows the whistle and decides who goes on when. The students play, and some of them win.

It is a well-run morning, and the students learn very little from it about running anything.

We tend to treat school activities as contests, so the adults keep hold of the decisions that matter, because they are better at them. The team is better coached. The school play is better directed. The result looks good on the noticeboard.

But the result was never the point. People learn by doing the thing, and the thing being done on that field, the choosing, the planning, the calling of a substitution, is being done by the one person present who already knows how.

Imagine the teacher's job was not to coach the team but to teach two students how to coach it. The team would probably lose more often. Those two students would learn more in one afternoon than in a whole term of playing.

Ask most adults which school moments shaped them and few mention a trophy. They mention the trip they had to plan, the class they had to get to the bus on time, the afternoon someone handed them the clipboard and walked away.

The lessons that stay are rarely the ones where you were told where to stand. They are the ones where you held the whistle.