Divulge, But Trust! Teens reveal in college admission essays what nobody should answer in an employment interview

University of Texas at Austin asks undergraduate applicants to write 500 words about this:

What was the environment in which you were raised? Describe your family, home, neighborhood, or community, and explain how it has shaped you as a person.

Princeton gets at the same question through this bloviating, self-congratulatory paragraph:
Using one of the themes below as a starting point, write about a person, event or experience that

Tell us all about yourself...

helped you define one of your values or in some way changed how you approached the world ...“Culture is what presents us with the kinds of valuable things that can fill a life. And insofar as we can recognize the value in those things and make them part of our lives, our lives are meaningful.” Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy and chair, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University.

For those of us with teens in the thick of college applications, this kind of wind-bag-couched request for comprehensive self-description is commonplace. Teens are nervous and seeking to please and still have a naive relationship with privacy. And a whole consulting industry has sprung up around advising what personality traits and gender characteristics to flaunt, which ethnic and racial stereotypes to jettison, what kind of family-upbringing and income characteristics to be proud of, which dialects are endearing and which sound stupid. Armies of Chicos-clad admission officers are pouring over this minutia for our own good, we tell ourselves. And our teen, who has already felt a hundred eyes examining her, plays along.

It hardly crosses our minds how far this veers from the core of what our teen is trying to do: to get (publicly subsidized) access to (many state-funded) educational institutions.

Alia Wong wrote in October Atlantic Monthly
about a Korean-American girl whose college application
coach and tutors advised her not to sound
"too Asian" in her application, and to omit details
 about her love of mathematics or violin-playing. 

And because our teens live in a divulging culture, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to them to reveal so much personal information that is irrelevant, prone to subjective judgement-making, and unverifiable.

But try to think of the most awkward job interviews where you’ve either been the candidate or sat alongside someone who was totally out of line:
So I hear you have a really big family, huh? How many kids again? Wow!
I was so sorry to hear about your illness. You are such a trooper!
So you’ve just got married! Congratulations! I wonder if you’re thinking about children?
I didn’t realize Scott is your partner! He’s such a nice guy.
Was that YOU I saw at mass last Sunday? I didn’t realize we go to the same church!
What an interesting last name. Now is that Persian?

Unless you fell off the potato-wagon yesterday, you know that whether you’re hiring, or promoting, or managing a team, or vetting a procurement, or screening rental applicants or health insurance claimants, or providing or receiving just about any kind of state service, that these kinds of questions or revelations are completely inappropriate.

Are applicants too young to understand the
inappropriateness of the kind of information
they are asked to divulge? Or too eager?
Or too trusting?

That also goes for ethnic background, spiritual beliefs, sexual habits and orientation, family background, relatives and their incomes, and any kind of subjective narrative about race.

And yet somehow nosy undergraduate admissions officers wormed their way out. They don’t just get away with such questions. They flaunt them. The celebration of culture, race, background, class-status, and identity oozes out of every line in the application form. It seems impossible to fill the demanded word-count without divulging a great deal of private and utterly irrelevant information.

And divulge we do. For the most competitive schools, we craft and second-guess and massage the message. Counselors help our teens put exactly the right face on themselves. (Georgetown University isn’t the only school to ask for a face-photo attached to the application itself.)

Why do we prompt our teens to divulge so much irrelevant personal information, when we ourselves would recoil and protest if any interviewer leaned across the table, and with a knowing wink asked, “Are you mixed race?” or “Do you come from a good home?” We sanction and assist the divulging, because we tell ourselves that these admissions processes are good, that their intentions are right, that their subjective reading of our personal situations is for society’s benefit.

Unfortunately, the divulge-but-trust-me culture is empowered by social progressivism, that stridently and self-righteously promises to engineer a better society by over-stepping personal privacy. I remember coming home from work incensed on the day that World Bank Human Resources promulgated a policy requesting all staff to annotate our HR profiles with sexual orientation and indicate if we are transgender. Why should I answer? How would you verify this? What is the purpose of this question?? I was enraged, but a cheerful HR officer with a helpful face and a hurt expression in her eyes said, “Colleen, this isn’t going to hurt you. This is so that we can maintain our diversity scorecard.” The explanation feels as meaningless and baffling now as is did then. I carried my anger alone, until my husband got a similar survey from the U.S. State Department.

We don’t need to look far back in history, or far from our doorsteps, to see the risks of divulge-but-trust-me. Excessive information creates a cover to disguise racial, religious, gender and other kinds of bias in selections. It sits on servers. It gets passed around. The profile data that seemed well-targeted to one audience turns out to be off-key to another. And so on. It’s why sensible adults don’t bring up these things at job interviews.

And that’s what we should be telling our teens, even if they will leave these questions blank.

What do we mean by Equality when we're talking about teen education?

What is equality? And when some of us get together talking about secondary education, why do I get the feeling we’re talking about different things?

Alexis De Tocqueville sees human equality as an inexorable force driving the ceaseless advance of democracy. He writes about equality in the opening of Democracy in America, “it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.” Equality then, is an undeniable fact. Human exertions continually reveal it, “some unknowingly and some despite themselves,” and thus what Fukuyama calls The March of Equality toward the ultimate political model, continues unstoppable.

The view of human equality as self-evident is central to the Jeffersonian view of democracy. Neither he nor Locke believed in an equality of physical endowments or intellectual capability (Jefferson was an aristocrat and slave-owner), but it was the idea of equality in the eyes of God, the equality of claims on life, liberty and happiness, the equality of a right to dignity, that formed the cornerstone of Western liberal democracy. The kind of equality Jefferson was talking about might not be visually evident, but it is morally self-evident that, under the eyes of our Creator, every human equally deserves opportunity and the tools for self-realization.

Education as a vertical

It should be no surprise, then, that underlying our day-to-day interaction with schools, curricula, education policies, and standardized testing, the desire to assert and protect equality motivates us. The No Child Left Behind Act drew on a vision of education as a vertical along which deviation should be minimized; the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 took this construct further--the vertical itself should be revisioned as a model in which everyone is on top.

Everyone is a winner

If education were an Olympic sport, while some teams are doping their athletes, ours would be preparing a hundred gold medals and a podium wide enough to hold all the contestants.

Of course these visual metaphors reflect an ideal behind legislation; in practice, the tools to effect greater equality involve reshuffling students and teachers, focusing time and resources on a few core competencies, standardized testing, and the re-allocation of (mostly state) funds. The focus is not on

When minimizing deviation
means minimizing choice

equal opportunity through individual choices, but toward equal learning outcomes through greater standardization. A key to social fairness, equality in education, according to this OECD policy brief, is enhanced when states minimize the sorting of students by aptitude and “manage school choice to contain the risks to equity”. (italics added)

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes can be consistent goals when they relate to essential life skills, particularly literacy and numeracy. These are baseline needs for functioning within an economy, for accessing new knowledge, managing one’s finances and communicating effectively. Governments should place high priority on young people mastering these skills and mastering them consistently.

However, secondary education should be something different. Teens’ strengths and emerging interests become much more diverse than can be well served by a system focused on delivering equal outcomes.

We see, then, a contradiction within the Western ideal of equality as it relates to education. Jefferson described humans that are inevitably equal, against all visible odds, equal in their claim to liberty and their right to their own pursuits. An aristocrat and founder of libraries, he emphasized the importance of cultivating literacy and virtuous citizens, but he also advocated for a very limited government, trusting the “moral sense and sympathetic instinct” of humans to guide their own development. On the other hand, the march toward universal success as a recasting of equality takes as its given that humans are born (or come to kindergarten) distinctly unequal, and that it is the role of an active state, through the narrowing of choices, the selection of a core of knowledge, and testing, to cast a K-12 corridor that reduces variation in outcomes.

The narrowing of choice and emphasis on equal outcomes seems even more inappropriate as the range of freely accessible online learning content has grown exponentially. As Clay Christensen pointed out in his 2010 book, Disrupting Class, the potential for completely individualized, personally-motivated learning has been around for years, but the design of school buildings and classrooms, allocation of teachers and supplies, still tends toward a monolithic, homogeneous process into which the child is inserted. Christensen optimistically predicted a sea-change within a year or two. But students are still covering books in September that reflect a state-endorsed curriculum and multi-year textbook procurement cycles; classes are still geared toward standardized tests.

Many families accept the inevitability of an equal-outcomes, managed-choice approach to secondary education, because it has been seen as inextricably connected to America’s other obsession: college admissions. I wrote about this mythical corridor earlier. Once admitted to college, these teens have grown into a passive, tell-me-what-to-think generation hardly equipped to grab life by the horns.

Plato and Nietzsche shared the view that humans deeply desire the dialectic, the ability to reason, judge, assign value, and have value assigned to ourselves. Hegel called it thymos, a demand for dignity that is an intrinsic part of the human soul. The ability to take up (or put down) a book, to become impassioned about a particular issue and follow it closely, to listen and respond to intrinsic interests within ourselves, to articulate opinions at odds with authority, is essential to our human dignity. But these are nearly impossible to replicate in an environment of homogeneous and predetermined content, and where achievement is measured as content mastery.

Dialectic doesn’t yield results we can benchmark, and so the teen’s desire for dignity and dialectic runs head to head with our social demand for equality of outcomes. And when any learning innovation is ultimately judged by the same measures of standard aptitude, then we are not only suppressing that dignity, we are telling ourselves it doesn’t exist. Even in praising the march toward equality, Fukuyama warned that “we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts.”

How to restore the balance of thymos in the teen soul? Families with adult children may have a clue. When the years of tests, grades and admissions have passed, individuals go back to being individuals. Will they visit a library? Read the news? Express concern for others? To start seeing your teen as a human, imagine ahead a few years. When all of the contents of required curricula are forgotten, will the roots of dignity and intellectual curiosity remain? If you’re not sure, it’s time to start planting the seeds.