You’re a great manager, but with your teen you’re pretty lame

Middle-aged parents who self-identify as highly-educated are a pretty monotonous bunch. Get one pregnant, and she’ll overhaul her diet. Deliver a baby and they’ll obsess over neurological development. Grow a toddler and they’ll research five-figure preschools.

It was among this group that I once thought I could find kindred spirits to help teens renounce high school and blaze their own complex pathways. I tried economic arguments about debt and future markets. I tried philosophical arguments about agency and individualism. I tried forming a learning coop in our building, rallying carpools to local expert talks, mobilizing friends’ kids to foreign language chat groups, maker-spaces, and robotics labs. (To be clear, I was talking about extended hours, weekdays--real time--that comes from heart-and-soul commitment, not here-and-there visits after school). Maybe that was the kicker. Or maybe folks don’t like so many moving parts--set-ups, fee agreements, transport, logistics. I would have thought that the big guys I work around, who consider themselves pretty competent, who manage multiple projects with large budgets, who adapt to dozens of complications each day, have the skills to manage this kind of project, too.

But over years of attempted conversations, their replies have dimmed my hopes. Seems like when the age of aspirational breastfeeding and transcendental preschooling passes, parents of teens become more conformist than ever, content with the state-validated Velveeta cheese glob served up by zip-code with free transportation. Get the GPA, keep up the sports, record the so-called leadership. It’s the kind of scorecard only a blockhead-manager would apply. This leaves me scratching my head, because the same parents seem pretty well put-together as leaders and risk-takers. 

Between rejections, I have given some thought to what makes my friends and peers so lame when it comes to managing their teens:

• An if-it-aint-broke decision-making model: I have enough on my plate as it is!
• A lazy approach to complexity: I just don’t have the mental space for that!
• A nano-manager’s approach to task ownership: I don’t want to be wondering what she’s doing!
• A padded playground approach to risk: What if this doesn’t work out? 
• A Victorian view of class-ambiguity: She’d be cut off from the system! ...Then she’ll be paying the price one day…
• And an arranged-marriage approach to teen agency: She still has to get into college!

You see what I’m up against? From the looks of things, these folks ought to have the greatest resources to throw at teenagers, if only they weren’t such blockheads. No wait, I shouldn’t say that. These guys are my best chance for allies, after all. 

OK, I’ve written about how we get addicted to school as childcare solution and then hang on too long, how middle and high-school brainwash teens into seeing the future too narrowly, how high school’s college-obsession drives perilous debt-taking, and how by unbundling learning teens can invest intensively in what interests them most. But teens are still stuck behind parents. And it is this class-anxious, risk-averse, nano-manager parenting that stifles teens from discovering their voices. Can I offer some advice?

Decouple learning from childcare. When young people self-select into opportunities to chat with experts, hack with friends, build, break and design with mentors for hours on end, they are operating at a level that cannot be achieved in an everybody-together, requirement-driven, behavior management system. When parents assume their teenagers need heavy-handed behavior-management, they may be inhibiting the growth of self-motivation and self-discipline. And as our culture trends toward zero-risk/tolerance, we’re missing important developmental opportunities to fool around, slack-off, mess up, and learn. Good managers know that task ownership and empowerment enable productivity; second-guessing micro-management demoralizes teams.

Take deliberate steps to welcome uncertainty and risk. I know it sounds like horrible parenting to not know where your 16-year old is, but that was the norm when we were kids. How did we get here? Find day-to-day opportunities for your teenager to speak for herself with strangers, navigate your city, manage payments, and find her way home from new places.

Ask her what’s interesting. And be prepared to listen. It’s a challenge not to frame this question around traditional education subjects, and teens just escaping from the conveyor belt will think that’s what you’re asking for. It takes time and patience and many iterations to start hearing things like I wonder why old people are so lonely? or What goes into my shampoo? or Do you think we’re being spied on? And rather than reverting these ideas to the boxes of traditional school subjects, think with her about the trajectories these concepts could launch. I wonder about that, too. What happens to our minds as we get older? Does talking and meeting people make us healthier? Which part of the brain gets engaged? Is it a good idea that older people often live so far from their families? How could they maintain feelings of independence but benefit from more interactions? Every one of these questions is a legitimate springboard to so many more articles, books, lectures, and business case studies. And if her room starts to look like a mess of clipped articles and diagrams, she is chatting with different people and visiting places around town, then you’re making her comfortable to explore.

Get comfortable with dropping “foundational” content. This is how we hobble teens’ emerging interests and re-allocate all their potential energy. It’s based on some visual of building-blocks, cornerstones, and other bricklayer metaphors. Chronological history. Transcripts. The relentless sequence of math textbooks. In our own lives, we would never approach problems this way, but we’re remarkably stubborn with our teens. Get outside the bricklayer metaphors, and think about ideas as complex webs. The threads will grow where there is intrinsic curiosity, and stay strong where knowledge loops to emotion and experience. Maybe that polynomial equation will loop in, or maybe it won’t. There will be millions of unexpected threads, and you don’t have to put them there by force. She will find them when her curiosity and motivation are authentic.

Encourage her to write goals and make graphic representations of her progress. This will be good practice for managing herself, and then mobilizing and managing others. What is her vision? How does she communicate it? What is she aiming for? How can she document what she’s doing? Remember, this is a work in progress. She’s learning management skills by doing them, and she’s implementing a project that changes as she goes.

We can get comfortable with uncertainty and moving parts. Teens in pajamas all day. Or commuting around town til late. Great books read with no reports. Discussions on WhatsApp. Half-completed Courseras. Showing up at places where cool people are doing cool things… hoping one day they’ll pay her. Shoeboxes of circuits and wires, shoeboxes of leotards, shoeboxes of tempera paints. Facebook and Skype networks of tutors and mentors. Pencilled schedules, constant changes. Dozens of micro-payments.

Comfortable, right?

You’re squirming, I know. This sounds messy. And you’re going to give me one of the replies I told you about, because somehow your manager-brain isn’t working with your teenager.

Squint your eyes. Try to see your 15-year-old as a 25-year-old. You’re smart and take risks and manage people. Help her to start doing the same.

College-aged kids before 40? The lonely feeling of 'Stop! This whole thing is a hoax!'

So I started having kids at twenty, and now we have five. No need to go over the odd demographic niche I’ve been living in from attic-of-pizza-restaurant to condemned-tear-down in northern Virginia. I love my kids, I go to church, I homeschool. I also have a graduate degree, speak three languages and worked as a development economist for twenty years. It’s the running theme in my life that I kind of don’t fit in anywhere.

But in particular, it hurts to watch my older teens struggle with the overwhelming cultural demand for college-going, when I know the hype-in-slick-packaging, the readily available unbundled alternatives, and the real pain of debt repayment. It hurts, because their friends’ parents are all 50+ and happy as pigs in shit to send Zoe and Chloe to Barnard and Smith ($72,000/year be damned! She’s my pride and joy!), and because my age-mates are all at Gymboree.

I post rants against high school (it subdivides and micro-manages teens’ days to the point that nothing excites them. They become cynical, disengaged, mechanical models of what they think admissions committees expect), and my family and peers quietly click elsewhere. They are all happily snapping photos of 3- and 5- and 8-year-olds at school and pumpkin patches. Most of them see school as the heart of their lives, the wellspring of activities, friendships and community.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."

I post to homeschooling groups, but I feel like only a handful of us are homeschooling teenagers. Other posts are about physically juggling children, cooking and crafts, and the kind of hesitant creativity that seeks continual validation from a thousand other moms. Which books are you using? Which curriculum for such-and-such? Approaching the teen years is a fall-off in conversation. Seems like the kids quietly returned to school, or moms felt over their heads with pipe-cleaner and construction-paper projects. A few tentative mentions of things like edX and MasterClass, but so little reaction that it seems most haven’t heard of it yet. I’m not even sure if I belong in homeschool groups, because in fairness, I’m not really the one doing the schooling. I co-write curricula with my teens every about every two months, then find online resources and hire grad students to co-implement with them.

Among the overseas parent groups that we’re part of, as with most homeschooling groups, it seems the brave, pioneering approach to younger kids (He’s learning so much in Phnom Penh! Life is his classroom in Bishkek!) gives way to timid, conformist pragmatism with teens (He’ll need his APs, and we’ve got to work on that resume!), and so the return to U.S. and formal high school enrollment.

And then there are my tech-industry friends. I guess these guys also belong in the Gymboree category, because the smarter you get, the longer it takes to make a baby in America. I get so confused talking to them. Nobody wants to sound stupid. Of course we are all using Scratch. Of course we follow Sebastian Thrun’s tweets. Everybody is advancing in his free time in coding and art-photography and home micro-brewing. The revolution in education, skills and networking has already happened, Colleen, didn’t you know? They are a curious bunch, because as social progressives, by-and-large they are instinctively defensive about public schools. Teachers are heroes. Schools are the root of the community (cause none of them goes to church). And it helps that they’ve all got great zip-codes. But I suspect theirs is the kind of backyard, wine-and-cheese progressivism that will ease toward closed-circle Math Olympiads, ArtofProblemSolving teams, engineering tutorials, and timely, well-documented volunteer initiatives around the Bay area, all in time for an MIT application. In short, there hasn’t really been a revolution in education, skills and networking, but new formats to an age-old, elite choreography whose subtle cues--wink, nod--their offspring will certainly follow.

And so, my parental peers turn out to be thickly padded, brand-sensitive, or else dimly aware of lower-cost alternatives. My age-peers are still lactating, or else caught up in the warm-and-fuzzy-feeling of zip-code-lucky primary schools.

Believe, believe, believe!

School-bashing to them is like Santa-denial. I can’t bear the reactions in their faces.

But somebody’s got to listen, and I’m finding kinship in my expanding network of Facebook friends, about 18-25 years old in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Ukraine. Our connections are the result of years of university-project work and I think a message that’s resonating. School sucks! It’s not only boring, but where they live, it’s devoid of relevant content, corrupt, and required by law. Worst of all, kids are swept into it at a trusting age, conditioned to comply and that compliance--that is, obedience, obsequiousness, neatness, memorization, regurgitation--promises success in the real economy. As teens, they feel, but can’t say, that a decade of their lives is being stolen and wasted. Public universities in these countries often looks much the same.

And so it’s these young adults, 19, 23, 25 who link up with me and seem to share an excitement in finally speaking out. They are emerging from a brain-washed process. They’re disillusioned. They’re pissed. It’s a generation that asks, “What the hell have I been doing?”

Girls gathering in Kart-e-char Kabul for BreakAway
Learning mentored co-study session. They are
pursuing individualized study plans in health,
 journalism and coding.

Because only now they are seeing that the real stuff is on Udemy, YouTube, 24Symbols, Udacity, Codecademy… They have nothing that a modern corporation or international employer wants. They are starting from scratch.

It’s for them that I’m speaking out, even as my age-mates respond with blank, hurt smiles, my sons’ friends scream and flap their hands when their mail arrives, my techie friends have written me off as a Christian conservative. It’s hard to jump in front of anybody else’s teens, wave your arms and say “You’ve got it all wrong! Get off the train now!” And among the upper-middle income, social-signal-sensitive families, the track that Zoe and Chloe will follow in these years is sacred. What I’m shouting--“Get off! Spend a day clicking around YouTube! Volunteer full-time for two-months! Go study at Kenyatta University or NIT-Delhi for a semester! Check out Bartleby! Try Udemy! Take a homestay in western China! Skype daily in another language! Try a local internship! Link-up with experts around the world!”--offers none of the trusted branding and packaging. It sounds suspicious and perverse.

Too bad for brainwashed-by-high-school American teens with plenty of household credit, low ambition and no sense of ownership of their learning. Have fun at Wet-Paper-Bag-College-of-Undergraduate-Degrees. While you are plagiarizing essays and parroting each other’s politics, an unseen cohort is passing you by. They are the emerging millions of intermediate- and advanced-English speakers in low-income countries. They have mobile 3G and cracked-screen Samsungs, but they are sensing sooner than you will that the system is a waste of time. They are cobbling together at $20 and $30/month skills in coding, machine learning, project management, graphic design, translation, and social media-marketing. They would be thrilled to earn $10,000/year. And that’s about a quarter of the student debt that the average American 24-year-old has.

Am I crazy?

What if We Graded Students on Motivation Instead of Content-Mastery?

It’s back-to-school time for many of us, and as we buy planners and sign parental consent forms, it’s a good time to consider why we’re doing this, anyway.

Our local school refers to its curriculum as “units of mastery”, IB schools talk about “mastery-learning”, and standardized tests refer to “content-mastery” and “scholastic achievement”.

But what if all of these terms are putting an important-sounding name on a phenomenon that is really superficial and temporary?

How much can he absorb?

We’d like to think that by October, our seventh-grader has “mastered” four qualities of igneous and sedimentary rocks, our ninth grader has “mastered” the factoring of quadratic equations, our eleventh-grader has “mastered” six economic and political dynamics preceding the American Civil War. But where has this content gone, and how will it interact with other bits of knowledge, ways of thinking and solving problems in their future minds?

Admittedly, our children and their school experiences vary, and some of them will hold on to facts and rules for a surprisingly long time. (I can still sing the 50-states song, and chant the most common English prepositions in alphabetical order). But with the exception of songs, chants and Please-Excuse-My-Dear-Aunt-Sallies, many of which hang from a disjointed scholastic neuron in our aging minds, where does the rest of this content go?

If we can be honest with ourselves, it goes to the same cognitive rubbish heap as administrative process-rules from the job you held 12 years ago, phone numbers of earlier contacts, turn-by-turn directions to the grocery store in the town you lived in three towns before this one… And what would an adult say about any of those forms of knowledge? Well, actually, that you don’t need to know them, because an app knows them for you. You need to know how to get at them, how to find them when you need them, how to update or revise them when necessary.

But it’s uncomfortable to say that about teenagers. We feel viscerally that they should know how to find the roots of a parabola, say something about the Monroe Doctrine, name various kinds of wetlands, even as we ourselves could not, and most of us have never been asked to do so since high school. If you asked me right now, I would ask Siri.

Where does all the information go?

For our teens, who would love to hear me say that, we fear it’s letting them off the generational hook; it’s excusing them to return to Instagram and Buzzfeed. But the “content-mastery” approach is misguided for two reasons.

First, we are over-optimistic about our human capacity to meaningfully assimilate arbitrarily-assembled content and hold on to it over time. Admittedly, for every subject in our teens’ classes, from the water cycle to post-Civil War reconstruction to Hamlet to sexually-transmitted diseases, we find important lessons that ought to guide their future interaction with society, decision-making and perspective. In the same way, policymakers wish that adults would learn to wear seat-belts, get health insurance, eat vegetables and file a 1040 correctly. But we’ve learned a lot about the failures of massive-education in these contexts (for example, about improving adults’ financial literacy, energy efficiency, and health). In particular, the failures of classroom-style learning, excessive content, boredom, poor timing, disjointedness, and disconnection from practice, have been explored for years, but seemingly in a separate space from our attitudes about teen education. We wish for activated knowledge and informed decision-making, but our approach is like the Microsoft User Guide (notice how the iPad comes with no guide and just one button).

Second, the champions of content-mastery (many of whom hold tenured positions) poorly prepare students for the cognitive iron-man that is lifelong skills adaptation. Yuval Noah Harari’s October Atlantic article warns about the demands of an accelerating knowledge-assimilation cycle brought about by artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies: “Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.” She predicts the emergence of a cognitive under-class: “By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.”

So what are we missing? What’s the ingredient that makes things knowable? That bridges the gap between knowledge and action? That makes the best entry-level job candidate and the strongest mid-career transfer?

Motivation.

Would it matter if I had forgotten the particulars of the Dred Scott Case, if I was generally motivated to read news, listen to analysis, and talk about the world? Would I be so badly off if I had forgotten the formula for compound interest if I was generally motivated to search around and try to use an online calculator before signing a mortgage? There is an obvious advantage to knowing things, and don’t think I’m making a defense of ignorance and forgetfulness.

What if how she approaches learning is more
important than what she's learning?

Only a reality-check about the limits of our confused and tired minds. As when the office changes the e-procurement system for the the seventh time in two years, I humbly suggest that we are not designed for this kind of learning-by-firehose.

But we are designed to get motivated, and I really believe that it’s how we want to be most of the time. I am motivated to look good, to make people like me, to do things that I can be proud of. We are motivated when we feel that we are in control, when we create things ourselves, and when we’re recognized for the things that we create (Ariely explores this wonderfully in The Upside of Irrationality. Also, there’s a great literature about all the things a bad boss can do to de-motivate her staff, and it’s funny how much of it is built into the structure of classroom learning).

It doesn’t make sense to measure content-mastery across students, because the structure which it applies uniformly to everyone de-motivates the individual learner. It doesn’t matter what you want. You are not in control. Learn these things here. It’s also not terribly useful, because content-mastery, we have seen, is a dressed-up fallacy. Today’s “master” of polynomial long-division is tomorrow’s blank slate. Don’t get me wrong-- there is content, and it can be studied and learned. (Let’s measure that at the individual level.) With motivation and context, it can be remembered and applied.

But that’s the kicker. Motivation is what matters. We would do our teens a huge service to cultivate it and reward it. And if there’s something that will more reliably track to success, not just on next week’s test, but in the eleventh job in the fifth city with the nineteenth information system, it is our relentlessly human motivation.

What's Behind the 'Social Solidarity' that America's Liberal Progressives Feel for Schools?

BreakAway Learning has started to grow organically in Kabul and Bo City, but as I practice our Indiegogo pitch on friends and family in the West, I’m discovering some paradoxical defensiveness about schools. And it’s making me think again about what is social solidarity, particularly in reference to the education of children.

[Parenthetically, I should say that The BreakAway Learning Project is agnostic about school attendance. We create time rotations in our learning clusters that enable teens to continue attending school if they wish, and some of them do. And while I personally think that school regimes suck up young people’s time and energies and convey a view of secondary education as a narrow college-prep corridor, I put my energies into the creation of individualized learning plans for each of our teens. I think if our product is right, teens will decide for themselves what is the best use of their time. Risk-taking and individual agency, after all, are what’s important.]

In the first place, it’s difficult to have an honest conversation about schools without coming across as teacher-bashing. Teachers have assumed a kind of ennobled victimhood in America, such that the only acceptable conversation about them is with regard to needed pay raises, better supplies, etc.

Other industries and services, from airlines to police forces to hospitals, can undergo a tough consumer scrutiny without counter-accusations that the consumer has dehumanized the flight attendant, cop, or nurse. Rather, a system is dysfunctional, and so even the noblest, most capable professional, has disappointed us. Why can’t we have that conversation about schools?

But there’s something else going on, too, and I see it paradoxically in our most affluent, highly-educated, ‘liberal progressive’ class from Alameda to Arlington. It looks like social solidarity, but remote, impersonalized, simultaneously claiming to empower identity while destroying it, celebrating tolerance of every ethos while avoiding identification with any and clearly disdaining people and communities that have one.

--Take for example Matt Damon’s support and narration of Backpack Full of Cash, a documentary funded by the teachers’ federation that criticizes the growth of privately-managed charter schools in Philadelphia, a city with an abysmal school performance record. The film lashes out against re-allocation of public funds to corporate-run schools, but never interviews

any of the students or parents that choose these alternatives. Are those families not also valued decision-makers? (Damon’s own children attend private school). Why in the area of education, particularly, do wealthy people feel so passionate about collective decision-making on behalf of lower-income people, whom they simultaneously lionize and patronize?

--Liberal progressives are hilariously schizophrenic in their love of children, too. They seem to advocate for children more strenuously in the abstract than in the publicly tantruming, snot-dribbling, stick-swinging, sibling-fighting, quick-witted, sarcastic, smart-ass concrete. As one who started having kids when I was still a student, I have advanced from the pity of affluent, middle-aged Georgetown mums (I studied at Montrose Park with #1 in Goodwill front-pack), to frowns and jabs on airplanes as our brood multiplied, to the age-old “helpful” remarks of the sister-feminist at shopping-center-meltdowns (pregnant with #5), You’ve heard of contraception, right? Indeed! It is from the ranks of these abstract, cerebral lovers-of-children, that we seem to hear more self-certain views about how they should be educated and raised, than from the puke-spattered, war-weary parents of actual kids.

--Perhaps the liberal-progressive skepticism toward alternative-education reveals that the core of their mutated-liberalism is not the individual at all (sorry, John Locke), but the collective. Dana Goldstein warns her ideological peers, “Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids” in Slate, “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive--by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole?” Wouldn’t a Jeffersonian liberal have held that it is indeed the mosaic of individual decision-making within a limited state that is conducive to, well, life, liberty and some kind of happiness?

--As schools, particularly secondary schools, are not just about literacy and numeracy, but are the incubators of children’s worldviews, I’m startled by the daily deference to an untransparent machinery whose cues and lexicon signal what are acceptable and unacceptable norms. During our first son’s enrollment at a Falls Church public school, we attended a tomahawk-making party on December 22nd. Our second son now studies film at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where

there is a Feminist Club, a Jewish Club, and an African-American Club, and where one unhyphenated prom was followed by Queer-Prom. The absent identifications speak louder than the named ones. Interlochen recently launched a “Community of Care” project to “directly address campus climate issues that leave students feeling marginalized; to promote the identification and sharing of best practices that promote diversity and equity”; the project involves the selective removal and replacement of facilities staff along hard-to-define parameters, seeking, “staff who have increased experience working with diverse populations and demonstrate high levels of cultural competency”. It is just this well-intentioned-seeming social-engineering that may cost a very competent Upper-Peninsula-born landscaper his job this semester, while sending subtle signals to my 16-year old son about what is valued and what is not.


I’m learning a few things about the American elite’s school solidarity these days, like a foreign film you should tell your friends you really enjoyed. It’s a signal that says “I’m diverse and tolerant and open-minded.” The truth that schools are zip-code specific, that real financial choice is out of reach of most families, that some of the most vocal advocates have personally mixed feelings about children, that schools grind individuality out of children, that their emerging expression is preempted by an elaborate signaling of acceptable language and thought, is not discussed at the backyard wine-and-cheese of this cohort. To acknowledge this reality is to stare, slack-jawed and belly-button-scratching at the foreign film and say “Huh?”

Clearly, I have a long way to go in refining my pitch for crowd-funding for BreakAway Learning among the group of Americans with the most financial capability to make a difference. Perhaps if the students in Kabul and Bo City, like Damon’s subjects in Philadelphia or my baby-hauling student self, look pitiful and poor enough, American funders will rally around a good cause. Little will they suspect that these teens are charging forward, becoming masters of coding and artificial intelligence, multi-lingual biochemists, writers and entrepreneurs. Individually and unapologetically, they will outstrip their American peers. Just watch! [And while you're at it, check us out on Indiegogo at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/breakaway-learning-project-kabul-kids/coming_soon/picahttps://www.indiegogo.com/projects/breakaway-learning-project-kabul-kids/coming_soon/pica ]