Raising my daughter by ten thousand suggestions

My 14 year-old daughter recently dug up a stick-figure drawing she made in kindergarten of herself scaling a smoking volcano. “I want to be a volcanologist”, she wrote, above the brown marker-haired figure in triangle-shaped skirt. That drawing, she remembers, set me into weeks of investigation about how one becomes a volcanologist--studying admissions policies at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, pulling up PBS films about Katia and Maurice Krafft, emailing Philip Kyle at the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory in Antarctica, and Darcy Bevens at the Center for Study of Active Volcanoes at University of Hawaii at Hilo. We watched, played, read and talked to folks about volcanoes until, not long after, she announced that she no longer wants to be volcanologist.

That was 9 years and about ten thousand suggestions ago. As my daughter tells me, sometimes she wishes I was a more ‘normal’ mom. I learned along the way that I could create whole life-stories for my daughter, latch on to briefly-mentioned ideas and cook up must-see, must-try, must-read lists faster than she cared to notice. I learned that suggesting too hard sometimes turned her off completely. A once-fun experiment became a chore, or my insistence on background reading made conversation stilted. The most heartbreaking response she could give me was an indifferent shrug.

OK, so I also learned a few things about suggesting. Suggesting is better in sweetened spoonfuls than inundations. Suggesting doesn’t need to watch her reading over her shoulder. Or to follow-up every time. The silence between suggestions is probably more valuable than the suggestion itself.

Like watching a 2-year-old’s vocabulary tentatively emerge after months of listening, and then explode in complexity, I’m starting to see with my daughter how years of suggesting--people, ideas, careers, dilemmas--is beginning to articulate itself. Like the 6-month old listening to her mother sing, the 9-year old absorbs something from her mother’s suggestions that’s not apparent to either of them at the time. Like a thousand open-ended questions that are only partly answered in words, but move to the front of her mind and seem to build a lens through which she watches the world. Am I here by mistake or intentionally? Is there a metaphysical purpose to my life? When will I know? Are we all living under the same moral framework, or is each one of us building his own? Would that be fair? Is anything fair? How long will I live? What will be the thing that I do that makes a difference? I couldn’t tell that this was happening when she was 7, or 9 or 11. But now I walk up on her and she is curled up with her tablet watching a YouTube lecture about the sanctity of human life. Or making lip balm in a jar from ingredients we found in the market. Or researching municipal strategies to manage street dog populations.

I am on fire with motherly purposefulness, but I’m learning to hold it back to let my daughter emerge. Watching her find herself is a quieter triumph than those explosions of 2-year-old language. But being purposeful, I’m also curious. Are other families suggesting? Are mothers calling around to find experts to talk to their kids? Are fathers messaging article links? Are grandmas talking up internship possibilities with their friends at the gym?

For me, suggesting has become a crusade. But I wonder, is it scalable? Do families by and large entrust suggesting to school teachers and guidance counselors? Can they be coached as better suggesters? Could an algorithm help? Or would a flashy, edtech solution or auto-nudging mobile app do for adolescent self-discovery what 8 hours a day of PBSKids does for sedated 18-month olds in low-quality childcare settings--that is, pretend at doing the right thing, while getting it exactly wrong?

This is just as much a moral challenge as a business problem. Suggesting is not by definition helpful, just as televised speech does not necessarily promote language development, when not coming through an engaged human. Virtuous cycles of suggestion rely on life experience, insight, and connectedness. When done right, suggesting nudges the young person into a hundred not-so-comfortable situations. It prompts thousands of conversations, often with strangers. It drives toward countless unsolvable problems and apparent dead-ends. It’s as exhausting as it is stimulating. It’s time consuming, needs the time of close family and friends, and can’t be easily priced, because there’s no apparent payoff. When we try to tell ourselves that it could be massively scaled and replicated, we find out bad-suggesting looks like: mechanical, inert, rooted in default-settings and biases, one-size-fits-all, that just keeps hammering away.

How could I plant the seeds of healthy suggesting in families with pre-teens and teens? I’m excited to see what BreakAway Learning can do to help teens and their parents feel more comfortable about exploratory learning, to put it out there completely free, and see if it can drive a change in behavior. But I know the limits of what a website can do. Good suggesting comes from strong communities and strong families. And those aren’t scalable.

If learning is an evolved adaptation, then why aren't teens curious?

The Duke Institute of Brain Studies has taken an interest in BreakAway Learning, and we're delighted to have this blog contribution from Duke graduate student, Leon Li. Leon focuses his research on psychology, language, and shared intentionality. His work highlights the human social cognitive capacity for reasoning about others' mental states. Learn more about his work at: https://psychandneuro.duke.edu/people/leon-li 

Greetings, BreakAway family! When Colleen kindly asked me to write a blog post relating psychology to the BreakAway project, my thoughts turned to some ideas from developmental psychology that I hope to share here. To begin, I am grateful to Colleen for the wonderful opportunity to write a blog post relating psychology to the vision of the BreakAway Learning Project. 

BreakAway raises two concerns about the education system: 1) the education is not motivating, and 2) the education is not useful. Ideally, we want the system to embody both motivation and usefulness: we want students to be highly motivated to learn things that are highly useful. 

Where did boredom come from?

It seems that society is reluctant to allow students to pursue their intrinsic motivations, for fear that the topics that would be most motivating to students would not be very useful (e.g., the worry that students would just devote their time to learning how to mix beats on Garageband). The position that society seems to have settled on is to compromise motivation for usefulness, that is, to compel students to study topics that are not motivating but are, at least, useful. 

BreakAway’s critique, however, is that the current system may not be motivating – or useful! 

I am sympathetic to this critique. Since I don’t know much about economics, I can’t comment on how to improve usefulness. Here, though, are some thoughts about motivation.

My impression about the motivation to learn is that learning is optimal (i.e., most motivated and most effective) when it occurs in a goal-directed, socially situated setting. This is because learning is a cognitive skill that has evolved over millions of years to be adaptive for a particular kind of setting. It stands to reason that learning, as an evolved adaptation, would function best in the naturalistic setting for which it evolved.

What was the naturalistic setting for which learning evolved? Certainly, it was not the setting that we use today, namely, age-segregated classrooms that teach abstract, specialized, and inapplicable knowledge (and then burden the rest of the students’ time with tedious homework).

Rather, learning evolved to take place in the spontaneous movements of everyday life. Learning evolved to enable children to participate, from an early age, in all the various normative, cultural, economic, and instrumental practices that constituted their in-group’s way of living. The fact that children are intrinsically motivated to learn and to participate in culture is apparent to anthropologists and parents everywhere.

Thus, the real question is not: how do we inspire curiosity? A bright curiosity already exists from the start. The real question is: why does curiosity go away? Or, to put it another way: how do we keep curiosity from going away?

Here is a preliminary answer. If learning is best adapted for a certain kind of setting, it stands to reason that the motivation to learn will be best preserved if the natural setting for learning is likewise preserved. Here is where BreakAway’s proposal seems intuitive and fitting: provide students with settings where they can pursue their intrinsic motivations, and then facilitate the pursuit of those interests with the guidance of adult experts.

I think that these settings would really strengthen the motivation to learn. The real joy of learning, I think, is the joy of discovering things together. We may say that shared intentionality (i.e., the

Shared experiences and knowledge are inherent to
learning.  That is, our brains work better with peers.

alignment of mental states onto shared referents, such as shared experiences or shared knowledge) is inherent to learning. Two important settings of shared intentionality are peer interaction and expert guidance. Of course, both are vital contributors to the learning process.

In peer interaction, learning really takes on a spirit of discovery. When experts are not around to present students with “the truth” in a readily packaged form, then students must turn to their own reasoning, deliberation, and exchange of ideas to construct a vision of what makes sense. What makes peer interaction so special is that it actually reflects how science works at the boundaries of knowledge. Scientists who work on unanswered questions cannot turn to experts, since the knowledge has not yet been found. Instead, scientists turn to each other.

On the basis of their existing knowledge, scientists formulate questions and hypotheses, propose and administer methods to pursue those questions, interpret their data, and present all the steps of their questioning, hypothesizing, data collection, and data interpretation to their peers in the scientific community. The scientific process is dynamic, and the boundaries of knowledge are always changing. To give students a portrayal of science as a “list of right answers” is really to deprive them of the experience and the joy of thinking – real thinking – about how to make sense of the unknown.

In addition to peer interaction, expert guidance is also crucial. After all, expertise does exist; it is not like we have no previously established knowledge deserving of our confidence.

Students could really benefit from the company of experts. Experts not only know the material of their expertise, but they also know what they don’t know – and what others are likely to not know. In psychology, there is a bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency for novices to overestimate their knowledge because they don’t know what they don’t know. In addition to helping students counteract the Dunning-Kruger effect, experts can help students in all sorts of ways: helping them ask the right questions, helping them look in the right places for answers, and providing encouragement. Overall, we may say that experts may provide “scaffolding” for students who are, so to speak, building their knowledge from the ground up.

It makes sense to situate learning within its natural evolutionary setting: in collaborative groups where students pursue their intrinsic interests, while being guided by the wisdom and expertise of their elders. The idea that learning should be situated within its natural setting is a simple one, but an elegant one and perhaps a much-needed one in this time.

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.

The Corridor Myth in Teen Education

When we were still trying to make a go of MOGwee Inc (a private, C- corporate aiming to create a marketplace of one-on-one, inspiring chat), my colleagues and I believed that creative, inspiring, one-on-one chats would find a home inside of secondary schools. I personally wrote to more than 400 secondary social studies teachers in Arlington, Bethesda, Brooklyn, Palo Alto, Austin and Ann Arbor-- cities where I thought, if anywhere, teachers would be pushing students to chat with a Khmer Rouge survivor, or with a first-time Afghan voter, or with an Ebola-treating medic.

I tried reaching ambitious high-schoolers from multiple angles-- from their Boy and Girl Scout troops to their churches to their school administrators and parents-- only to be pushed back with the same messages. That wouldn't fit into our curriculum. We really don't have time. My son's so busy with sports and clubs. His APs are taking all his time. Would there be any credit for doing this? Translation: School defines what teenagers prioritize, not teens.

The rhetoric of secondary education: We are preparing young people to get into college.

The myth of secondary education: There is only one way forward. The smartest and most ambitious teens believe they are moving down a narrow, segmented corridor with many bolted doors; they must satisfy without question the demands of every gatekeeper to advance to the next segment of the corridor. As they advance through each door, the inane and discontinuous demands of each gatekeeper are apparent. But that doesn't deter them, especially if they and their parents are aspiring and hard-working. PSAT? check. National Merit? check. AP tests? check. SAT? check. Entry essays about self-awareness and changing the world? check.

Teens believe they are moving along a narrow corridor,
divided in segments with bolted doors between. To pass
to the next segment, they must fulfill the tasks
assigned by the gatekeeper. 

Talking to 20-somethings casts a new light on the problems that teen tunnel-vision creates down the road. Within one or two years of high school graduation, many young people are caught off guard by the question of what they will do with themselves; the same adults who have given them no agency in their schedule, classes, reading, suddenly expect an inspired life-decision. Many move through college in a continuing auto-pilot of ticking-boxes, satisfying requirements, trying to keep parents and instructors happy. A few years later they see that even happy parents and instructors have no further guidance, no idea how the next leap will work.

And it's the later-20-somethings who have taken off their blinders, cast a glance back along the path they traveled, and realize that they could have come to the place where they're standing now by a thousand different ways. The corridor is a fiction. Getting out would have been as easy as taking a step to the side. And outside the corridor is a vast field to run, to zig-zag, to tumble down or to surge in any direction.

I have offered this metaphor to school administrators and students to try to visualize a behavior that I think is harming our young people. I don't believe that teens are inherently narrow-minded and self-constraining-- quite the opposite. This is a learned behavior at odds with the instinctive rebellious, sarcastic, destructive, creative, risk-taking nature of teens. But the corridor is a socially revered construct, which adults having emerged from it, disillusioned, go on to reconstruct for their own children. How do many young adults stay on their parents' health insurance? Go to college. What kinds of expenses are eligible for tax-preferred college savings accounts? Full-time enrollment at an accredited university. When could college savings accounts provide for housing? When the young person is full-time enrolled at college. When HR officers click the drop-down menu to identify your highest level of education attained, and there are only 3 or 4 options, what is the baseline she's looking for? A 4-year college degree.

Is it any wonder, then, that our brightest, most ambitious young people are collectively brainwashed from about 14-25, believing their lives to be a narrow corridor? And parents, teachers, administrators, counselors, whether they really believe the myth or not, carefully maintain and rationalize it. We are building a foundation. They are learning how to learn. They are learning to take responsibility. They are becoming leaders and thinkers. Few will say that the corridor itself infantilizes young people, removes agency, risk, consequences, and any interaction with the real world. Baby hawks and polar bears are more prepared for the roles they will have to play as grown-ups than our young people.

Breaking the corridor-illusion is not about exposing children to risk or 'leaving them behind', it's really about breaking the monopolistic hold of universities on the American imagination and the American income. It's about calling college what it is--a consumer product. It's about admitting that teens are really very unique and will naturally move in a million different directions when given the opportunity. Secondary education is not a corridor, because by the time young people are 14, 15, 16, it gets harder and harder to argue credibly that there are universal standards, universally useful knowledge. It's a field-- wide and rolling -- with possibilities that parents, teachers and counselors can't anticipate. And mentoring young people to find their own zig-zagging paths is something more difficult, but necessary, to raise capable adults. 

The School Bias: Why homework takes precedence over learning

It's been a rocky start for MOGwee, and I'm learning the difficulty to create a marketplace that balances supply and demand. Actually, the supply part has not been hard to build. Visiting musical conservatories, universities, political action groups and art studios from Nairobi to Phnom Penh, and working through my local teams, we easily find amazing people who are eager to share their perspectives and skills. We have uncovered incredible personal stories, and put together Study Projects that (we think) could excite young people to look at everyday problems--from trash to hand-washing to election campaigns-- in new ways.

But demand has been the tough nut to crack. And I mean really tough. I was disappointed, but not too surprised when one American high school teacher told me that her students have second-grade reading levels, and that she would be unable to attempt any of these studies in class. MOGwee targets bright students who are personally driven to learn. But it looks like those very students are the most straight-jacketed, least exploratory of all.

"Our focus is on AP test scores," one principal told me. "Our students will only go above and beyond if they get college credit," another principal said. "This is all very nice, but my daughter has homework, band rehearsal and lacrosse," one mother complained. I realized that MOGwee sits to the side of the conveyor belt that is teen college-prep, and that's a fatal place to be.

But what's startling is how many young adults admit (if you ask them), that they feel lost and meaningless in the process. Why am I factoring this quadratic equation? Why am I listing the three properties of igneous rock? Why am I making a Prezi about the water cycle? One secondary teacher remarked thoughtfully, "Our students' days are regulated from the moment they wake up til the moment they go back to sleep, and we can hardly depart from curriculum. But when they're 17, we say, 'So whad'ya wanna be when you grow up?'" What do we expect?

David Jenkins (right) initiates plan with Principal Kamara,
United Methodist Church Secondary School in Bo City, Sierra
Leone, for pilot group of "independent study program"
(homeschooling is not legal) under their auspices. 

So recently I began working with my partners in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan to try to help young people break away from the conveyor belt process. Let's call it the Breakaway Learning Project. We're mobilizing the (very few) teens brave enough to say "no" to standard curricula, and setting them up in small mentored teams with individualized curricula that draw on MOGwee, edX, Coursera, Khan Academy, Brilliant, Codecademy and more.

I believe the demand for inspiring, individualized learning is out there. It just needs to be emancipated.

Put talent one click away

Zahra recalls her family's experience when the
Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and eyes her
future skeptically. She shares her story and
Farsi conversation on MOGwee.

Last week I posted that talented people too often find work ad hoc. It doesn’t have to stay that way. Just as Airbnb and Uber have re-trained markets to put services where people are demanding them, we need a platform that puts amazing people, perspectives and skills one-click away.

Santos advocates for better public health practices
in Sierra Leone, but his work has been dangerous.
After losing his parents to Ebola, he redoubles his
efforts to improve sanitation and hygiene practices.
He shares his story and hopes for success on MOGwee.

Mautasm escaped Syria with his family as a young teen,
and left his parents when he ventured across the Aegean
 on a small raft with his brothers. His journey was marked
 by fear, deception, and xenophobia, but he remains optimistic.
Now finishing high school in Germany, he shares his story on
MOGwee, trying to earn enough to write a book.

So this spring with my cousin and friends we cooked up MOGwee.com, where curiosity meets talent.
The platform enables users to explore fascinating people the way we search Amazon, book time to chat, e-pay, and video-chat all in one place.



This message isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a call to invest more of ourselves in the people around us. Do you know someone over-talented and under-compensated? Think about referring her or him to post a profile here. Are you looking for a Dari instructor, a meditation coach or a traditional healer? Or would you be ready to talk to a young woman in Mazer-e Sherif about her life under the Taliban, or a young man in Freetown who lost his family to Ebola? Expand your boundaries and take things from another perspective for a change.

I want people to earn more. I want to create a million jobs. Help me do it.

#MOGwee #marketplaceofhumanexperience