Why does the state pay when a senior chooses his treatment, but not when a minor chooses his education? Who gets dignity and who gets a pat on the head?

A seventy-year old Medicare recipient chooses his doctor, books (or not) his own appointments, agrees (or not) to recommended procedures, and the state pays. 

With privacy, information and selection, the senior
chooses his care, and the state pays.

A WIC recipient shops like you and me at a grocery store. But a 16 year-old is taken to the school that serves his zone, is assigned (mostly) to classes, assigned books, assigned timing, assigned goals. If he chooses differently, he pays--twice (because his parents already paid taxes).

We shouldn’t be surprised that surveys of student perceptions about public secondary schools in aggregate are so bleak. Fewer than 15% enjoy going to secondary school. As Christensen finds in his 2008 study, Disrupting Class, most secondary students would prefer to do something else with their time. More than 80% indicate that what they’re seeking from school is time with friends and feeling good about themselves--not priorities that schools design for. Bryan Caplan describes a climate of cynicism and superficial engagement in The Case Against Education: minimal effort applied to achieve acceptable grades, decreasing hours invested in study, avoidance of difficult classes or assignments not required for graduation, celebration at class cancellations, and pervasive self-reported cheating. Hardly the behavior of a consumer paying for a service.

Healthcare makes a good comparison, because we similarly treat access as a social imperative, but the patient is the consumer, and we believe he should pay for a given service only once. A senior starts with a range of online tools, he considers how he’d like to address his needs. He can find and compare providers, consider distance, years of experience, other patients’ reviews. He can walk away from a recommendation. He can seek a second opinion. He can change course midstream. He can complain, post feedback, file a lawsuit. Medicare is a cash transfer (within constraints) that enables the senior’s decision-making about caring for his own health.

The secondary student, by contrast, is a non-entity. The group he’ll be assigned into, the books they’ll read, the content that’s prioritized,

You can choose where you'd like to sit.

have largely been determined before his arrival and irrespective of his interests. By contrast to the senior, his choices are so minuscule and choreographed as to be insulting-- he can choose his seat in the room; he can choose from three essay topics; he can choose his lab partner (maybe). That the service is good or bad, useful or irrelevant, is measured not by his own assessment, but by a concocted measure of utility devised without ever consulting him. There are no star-ratings for this chapter or that, for this classroom, for this assignment, for this teacher. Did this day exceed/meet/underwhelm your expectations? 

Any feedback mechanism to the many services inside a public school is necessarily indirect: through parents,

Never seen in a public school.

through volunteer organizations, through a long chain of command. Community fundraising likewise benefits students indirectly. Rarely do you see a direct cash transfer to students to select learning options. Instead, laptops, smartboards, voting devices, musical instruments-- are owned, managed, and allocated by the school district. Most critically, in very few places do students have the means to vote with their feet. And in most of those cases, if they choose, then they pay twice. Public secondary school is a state monopoly that allocates resources on behalf of teens according to its own determination of what is collectively good education.

Teenagers are even non-entities in the social iconography of their own lives. In the paeans to school and teachers, teenagers play the role of cherub props. The impassioned voices are not teenagers, but politicians and public figures. They massage our civic imagination of downtown-parades-Oprah’s-book-club-apple-pie-and-cute-puppy-uploads. An actual teenage personality had better be airbrushed in this sepia-tinted world.

Part of the problem of teen students as non-entities is the extension of parents’ simplified management style going back to rearing smaller children. The breadwinners call the shots. They can’t handle another headache. While you live under my roof… and so on.

But it’s not only parents that ride along on teens’ non-entity status. It’s also an industry of child-management (only a fraction of this growth is actually teachers!) that validates and expands itself. It does this through an impassioned, heart-rending double-speak that makes an icon of teen-rearing while nullifying the teen and reappropriating his resources. University administrations latch-on and extend the same iconography: the sacred raising of young minds (nevermind our tuition hikes, monopolistic and untransparent practices, and the career-irrelevance problem).

In any other industry, it’s unheard to say that the industry itself is saintly, even if the overall purpose it’s serving is useful, live-or-die stuff. The heroic healthcare industry?

In his September 1990 address to the United Nations
on the occasion of the World Summit for Children
 and signing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
Vaclav Havel lamented years of “bent backs” and “servitude
to hated regimes” supposedly in the name of children.
He recounted horrors of totalitarian regimes “all this
 for the fake happiness of generations yet unborn in some
 fake paradise”, and he wished “if it were possible, I would
add another paragraph to the agreement I signed this morning.
That paragraph would say that it is forbidden for parents and
adults in general to lie, serve dictatorships, inform on others,
bend one's back, be scared of dictators, and betray one's friends
and ideals in the name and for the alleged interest of children,
and that it is forbidden for all murderers and dictators to pat
children on the head". ...We would wave off such a comparison
to compulsory school as hyperbole. But we would also shepherd
children--with great fanfare-- to 1500 hours per year stripped
of civil rights, driven by compulsion, silenced as consumers,
straight-jacketed as decision-makers. 

The martyrs of American food production? How would you feel about a poster with a United Airlines spokesperson patting a radiant passenger on his head? Even childcare centers and assisted living facilities don’t get the mushiness that is heaped collectively on schools.

No consumer is a radiant cherub. No $12,000 sale* is made on mush-factor. Something is missing-- what??

It’s the teenager! The teenager is absolutely a consumer! He or she needs encouragement and guidance, yes. Needs reminders and nudging and discipline, sure. But the teenager should compare and choose, take or leave recommendations, personally assess progress on terms which are valuable to him/herself, change course, vote with his/her feet, and give feedback. When we recognize secondary education as an $206 billion business with 15.1 million consumers**, we will-- as Vaclav Havel exhorts-- stop patting children on their heads, and compete to offer relevant, convenient, timely services. It’s not the end of the world when teenagers call more of the shots for their learning. It’s the end of an abusive hypocrisy.

*The range of per student per annum expenditure by schools varies by state, with New York ($21,206) Alaska ($20,172), District of Columbia ($19,396) Connecticut ($18,377) and New Jersey ($18,235) at the high end, and low-end states as low as $7000. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/cb17-97-public-education-finance.html?cid=public-education-finance

**Total spending in 2018 for grade 9-12 education by public schools in U.S., and number of enrolled students in public schools grades 9-12 same year. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

What’s an hour worth? Political prisoners teach us about the time-value (and human value) of self-determination

What is an hour of your time? Is it your output? Some benchmark wage? Even if you put a price on it, you know it’s something more. It’s not only making, it’s also being. And being doesn’t want a value-number, because being is too proud for that. An hour of being doesn’t promise anything. It demands full freedom for itself. Being presumes its own value.

Nietzsche wrote in Will to Power:
There is a solitude within him [sic: the “higher man”] that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.

Isaiah Berlin expanded on this idea in The Crooked Timber of Humanity:
It makes no difference whether a man’s own inner light shines for others or not; nor whether he serves it successfully; serve it he must, even if he makes himself ridiculous in the process, even if all he does ends in failure. Indeed this sort of failure is considered as being morally infinitely superior to worldly success, even success as an artist-- provided only that it is the fruit of the blind and exclusive service of what a man knows to be his mission, of what the inner voices tell him that he must do.

As one who loves the literature of political dissidents,

Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in the gulags,
including hard labor at Ekibastuzin in
northern Kazakhstan.
solzhenitsyncenter.org/timeline/

I take a lesson from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Liu Xiaobo and Milan Kundera. There is something in human time that thrives on its own free expression and withers under external control. An hour intrinsically motivated is something very different from an hour (or decade) extrinsically compelled. On the Central Asian steppe, in a Chinese re-education camp, in a prison in Czechoslovakia, these three were subjected to the crushing monotony of arbitrary, externally-imposed ritual. And make no mistake, such ritual is purposefully designed.

Kundera's early novel The Joke is considered
 a partly autobiographical account of arrest,
humiliation and prison sentence which the
author himself endured, narrowly avoiding
death penalty, and serving 14 years in a
Czechoslovak prison. 

To the letter it elevates and painstakingly justifies itself (why else carefully recorded confessions?), creates and sustains a massive bureaucratic machinery around itself (surely so many blouse- and tie-wearing officers cannot be wrong!), metes out soul-crushing brutality alongside ludicrous rituals of hygiene, productivity and patriotism, and always, unfailingly, documents, documents, documents!!

I often wish that anybody fervent about teen well-being would take the time to get acquainted with Solzhenitsyn, Xiaobo and Kundera.

They lived in systems that treated/treat the human spirit as a mush to be smashed and remolded into a thing: thing-1, thing-2 and thing-3. They should plug into machines that whistle and click, and a uniform glob should plop out the other side. It should plop cheerfully and reliably. This to the smiling, nodding approbation of

Liu Xiaobo was one of few Nobel Laureates held in prison
and unable to receive the award personally. He died in July 2017 not
long after release from prison. 

doe-eyed co-conspirators--classmates, co-workers, neighbors--who unflinchingly turned them over for arrest. These authors were unstoppable voices. But behind them were/ARE snuffed out millions that these machines in their perfect rhythm successfully digest.

Living at various times in Moscow, Kyiv and Astana over the past twenty years, I have only brushed with the machinery that continues to grind human time in the state clinics, post offices, railway ticket-counters, internats and state department stores--remnants of a deeply-ingrained culture of soul-smashing. The quiet, patient plodding from queue to queue, the never-quite-complete bundle of documents, the pleading, smiling offerings to petty demons, the rank smell of bad plumbing, the shrieking calls to wear paper shoe-covers. As a foreigner, I could observe--with irritation--from the privileged vantage-point of one not depending on or bound-into these systems. At the oncology center in Astana, I brought my kids and made small-talk during chemo. Notwithstanding the barking of the shoe-cover lady, impatience of the blood-tester nurse (we had to do it in a line), and the occasional cursing tirade from another patient, I tried to make the best of the hours there. The head nurse was fascinated with me and called me into his office for tea. ‘You’re the only patient we have who wants to go on living,’ he told me.

So what is an hour? For one thing, it’s defiantly not being dead.

Maybe there should be two different words for an hour. Here is an hour that celebrates the machine. It goes click-rattle-plop-plop. It sucks in the mush on one side, and pushes out the plop plop on the other. It generates the false hum of false progress. Its laborers dig ditches in the morning that they will fill in the afternoon, its farmers lean on hoes over crops that will be reappropriated, its production quotas, harvest yields, birth rates(!!) boast an impossible unity of compliance and desire.

Here is an hour that celebrates the man. It races by while he stutters and gasps to express himself. He flails and fights against monotony, fights to be meaningful.

These hours are not defined by geography or politics, but by our own estimation of the human being. Make no mistake that so-called free countries also hold task-masters, pinheads and bean-counters. How easily would we trade hours and years of another person’s life for the reassuring whistle-click-plop-plop, the reliability, the ritual, the documents? Who are we crushing along the way?

What’s the point of half-assed algebra? A case for some teens to stop

It’s a buzz word for foundation grants, optimistic local headlines, model schools, premature celebrations of against-the-odds engineers and mathematicians. It’s STEM.

Why do we love it so much? Why have so many first ladies, mayors and philanthropists thrown their dollars and heavily-made-up faces behind kids with beakers and protractors?

Better sit down and finish this...!

Part of us is going gah-gah for the narrative that a fun chemistry class or a zany math teacher will transform an unlikely young person into the next astronaut or Google executive. The other part is sighing (silently). Yeah, right. We feel it, but we know we’d better not say so.

Go ahead and measure the length of the hallway, freeze and melt some water, light that thing on fire and then weigh the ashes. We should smile and rally around the camera.

After this star-studded visit, Excel Academy was
 forced to close its doors in January 2018
for poor performance. It re-opened in August.

Too many over-promising STEM projects have made big deals about mediocre programs in math and science, only to disappoint with results later on.

That’s awkward to say, but it’s not the only problem. The other problem we are unwilling to say.

What if some teens are actually better off to stop studying a math or a science?

[In most schools, these are rigidly hierarchical subjects with pre-set texts like pre-algebra, algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus; or earth science, biology, chemistry, physics. Even veering laterally into something like logical thinking, visual puzzles, game theory, behavioral design or psychology is rarely an option. So when I say STOP, I mean, get off that narrow conveyor-belt of classes that high schools call math and science.]

What are we expecting will come from the extra hours of painfully muddling-through by a teen who has already demonstrated no enthusiasm and very little aptitude for a subject? What will the memories of slope-intercept equations, rate-time word problems, momentum equations and atomic numbers cumulatively represent a year later? A decade later? We are (most of us) more willing to listen to reason when a child tells us she’s sick of violin or no longer interested in basketball than when she says she can’t stand another math class. Why is that?

I’m caught in the line of fire between two of my children who are non-reactive to math, their father and grandparents who won’t give up the cause. I would say it becomes evident around age 11. [With 5 kids, my sample size is small.] Before then, I agree with math-lovers that we all need a basic measure of numeracy, anyway. Counting, adding, comparing, visualizing, demonstrating equivalence, considering rates and proportions. At around 11 years, I started to see that some kids were comfortable in math textbooks and Khan Academy and ArtofProblemSolving: seeing it once, turning a concept upside down, extending a model to another application. But for these two, it has been just painful. Yes, we could play games, make models-- we have already veered into logical puzzles, game theory and perception. But mathematics the way Sal Khan, McGrawHill, McDougall Littel and the rest do it-- that became a daily misery. So when our second son was about 14, I quietly let math slide; with no major announcement to the family; we just stopped doing it. His energies veered into story-writing, film-making and guitar-playing. Our oldest daughter is now 13, and we’re getting to that point. Every hour that she doesn’t beat herself up with Khan Academy, she is sculpting, reading contemporary fiction, dancing or reading about neurobiology and visual perceptions. If I could measure their “success” in motivation and happiness, then they are really improving by setting math aside.

The math-faithful aren’t entirely wrong. Measures of scholastic aptitude from standardized tests to state-core curricula to the SAT include mathematics sections, which look to things like sine and cosine functions, polynomial factoring, quadratic formula, rate-time problems and complementary angles.

What if he's just not that into this?

Teens who have veered away from this stuff at a younger age will stand out as under-performers by these standards. It makes any reintegration into traditional classroom learning painful in this respect, and the college application process unnecessarily dramatic.

But here’s the absurdity. Teens who hate math know that they are tolerating it in order to reach the SAT. If they complete that and decide to go to 4-year college, then maybe another “core” requirement will need to be filled with some kind of math-for-poets class. But that will be all. And that will be the end. (If they shift away from 4-year university, then that abrupt ending will come even sooner). They step out into a workforce and community where almost nobody ever uses any of that McGrawHill content--EVER.

I know we’re trained to resist that observation with every muscle in our bodies, but please try this experiment with me. Next time you’re at block party (except in Cambridge, Los Alamos or Mountainview), ask your neighbors. Who has factored a quadratic equation today? Who can tell me when two drivers from Toledo and Duluth will meet?

The reality that we live with but resist admitting to ourselves and our teens, is that a few of us with exceptional talents in math or sciences design and create systems that calculate, plan, predict, and optimize for the rest of us. There is hardly an economic role for sloppy and error-prone half-competencies (Kissenger makes an ominous prediction about the capacity of artificial intelligence to re-write the roles of humans in this June Atlantic Monthly article) . From downloadable tax preparation software to Google flights to GPS navigation to online mortgage calculators to credit repayment calculators to office procurement systems, for most of us the real challenge is using the right tool at the right time as an aid to another kind of thinking.

For those other kinds of thinking, we would be wise to encourage teens to explore outside traditional curricula, while keeping eyes open to apps and tools as they emerge. How could music intervene to accelerate healing and reduce anxiety, and what tools would deliver it to the market at the right time? How could underemployed rural moms pool time to provide comfort-care to elderly and homebound people, and how could their driving and time be optimized? How could dogs trigger early warning systems in crowded places to mitigate the threat of mass violence, and how would their signals be translated across wide areas?

Opportunities are visualized by teams that bring together feeling, expressive, intuitive and calculating, ordering, implementing minds. Or creative people who find the right app to get a job done. So why do we try to stamp out teens with the same mold? We know that inspired, creative thinking is fragile among teens. It doesn’t turn on with a switch, and can be crushed by repeated failure-indications in subjects on which authority-figures place high priority. A warning against barging in on our young storyteller and insisting he should graph a few parabolas.

There is a weird and counterproductive optimism behind all this. It’s the mantra of core curriculum defenders that anybody can be anything. By investing hours and years in standardized curricula, every teen should have the same building blocks to decide to be an astrophysicist or an impressionist painter. Too bad we are all very different in our aptitudes and interests. Too bad there are only 24 hours in a day and millions of things to which you could have applied yourself. Too bad if somewhere along this boring route you tuned out and turned off.

In this family, a few of us are just pretending to be math-faithful. These years are short, and there’s so much more to do. Wait a few more years and nobody would notice anyway.

Take this screaming kid! How survival expediency drives school-going--years too far

Anyone who has tried calling me at 7:30am knows this is the impossible hour. I’m a completely different person: 

Me, 8:30am

frazzled, pleading, exhausted, confused. By the time I’ve got our screaming, publicly-undressing 5-year-old to the door of her kindergarten, it’s with a certain relief that I make that last push into the arms of her teacher and let the door slam. Bang! And then I breathe. Cause I’ve got eight hours.

If you don’t have children, you can keep sipping your caramel macchiato and judging. If you have any, you know what I’m talking about. By kid #5, my brain is so fried that I can’t remember when this started or if it’s getting any easier.

As when she’s asleep, when Bina is at school, she is angelic. The teacher sends WhatsApp pictures of her and the other children peeling cucumbers, gluing dried leaves, or celebrating a birthday. I feel a rush of warmth as I forward to husband and in-laws. By some miracle she changes her own clothes, washes her own hands, and takes naps on cue with other kids. And when I show up again at pick-up time, she is a completely transformed little person, regaling me with lessons

Tender angelic moments.

about covering my cough, where our food goes and how eyeballs work as we walk home together. School--and that brief intermission of sleep she allows me each night--is the reason why our few hours together are so precious.

When it comes to packing-up small children and restoring sanity, I hear you! I read with awe the posts on groups like Christian Mothers of Large Families that Homeschool and Thrifty Homeschoolers about moms who juggle 8+ small children for entire days of meals, bathing, lessons, activities, and pediatric appointments. I wonder if the children are actors, or if the mothers live on Red Bull. My husband used to wear ear protection in alternating ears at home when the kids were smaller, I guess protecting equally crappy hearing on both sides.

With the exception of those maternal endurance-athletes, most of us live in a state of near-collapse and mental decay that requires small children to be somewhere else for some hours of the day. We love them more that way. We also shower, earn money, respond to messages, and (we think) restore that spark that created those kids in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, homeschoolers-extraordinaire, my hats are off to you. I read about you with my twitching eye and scrambled brain, in the eight hours of solace while Bina is at school.

School is the warmed foil tray coming down the aisle. The four subsections of mild, brown-and-beige gruel for which we expectantly lower our tray-tables and stare impatiently at the cart.

Just enjoy. 

It’s not any one thing we’re hungry for, but it’s the reassurance that it’s all there, the warm, total package. And in rich countries, school takes care of it all. Transport, supervision, meals, toilets, behavior-management. That’s an irresistible package.

But what if we’re getting hooked on the airplane meal-tray? What if as parents, we’re so lulled and satisfied by the all-in-one package that we’re missing cues from our children that things really could be a lot better? Or what if we are programming our children through our own choices to expect that education is an inevitable daily routine as dull as re-warmed potatoes and gravy?

When would we be ready to live with our kids’ own choices about how and what they learn? At 8? 10? 12? I’m not offering any guidance here, just uneasiness that it seems we’ve pushed it back to after 20. Our kids can already vote, marry and enlist before most of us have given any leeway for choice about how they spend their time.

Why is that? As our kids become pre-teens and teens, I think our early parenting excuses become a cover. What if he wants to work part-time and study online? What if she wants to only read and paint? What if he spends three months coding competitively? What if she wants to only volunteer and take dance classes this spring? I don’t want to think about it, and This is one more headache, are how we appropriate our teen’s own risk-taking, dreams and plans to ourselves, revert to our 5-year-old-management model, and slam it behind a door. Bang! Cause it’s a lot easier that way.

There’s a more troubling explanation, too. Maybe we’re afraid of what our kids are made of. If we took away structure, routines, and minute-by-minute ordering of things, maybe they are horrible people. Maybe they would hurt others, or themselves. Or maybe they are apathetic lumps whom we would find in the same place on the couch at 6pm, where we left them at 8am. No principal would start a commencement address this way, but really, isn’t the whole industry of kid-management built on this Hobbesian premise? If not, then why bells? Why seating charts, three strikes, and cumulative grading? Our certainty about this comes from something deeper: We were broken, so they should be broken, too.

I know that I am broken. I’m scrambled and confused, and I stutter when I’m nervous. My kids had something to do with that. I love them and don’t mind the judgmental glances at 8am. I am still taking my youngest to kindergarten and look forward to our walks home. At some point, this arrangement, too, will give way to something messier, louder and less certain. I've got to let her do it, and won't have any door to hide behind. 

If the Goal Is Broadening My Horizons, Then Why Am I on This Campus?

We’re hearing the defense of liberal arts education more and more, from the critics of Betsy DeVos and defenders of loan forgiveness to the embittered humanities professors squeezed out by universities’ shifting priorities. They portray a battle between vocationalists and poets, business and ivory towers.

Was it serendipity that brought
these two together?

I’m a lover of books, of exploration, of living in new places and trying new things. I’m a defender of the liberal arts; but that’s why I can’t understand going to college.

Broaden your horizons! Learn to learn! Take time to explore! So goes the parent and guidance-counsellor wisdom about 4-year liberal arts degrees.

Getting in to the more elite schools requires looking like an explorer and free-thinker. A volunteer trip to Guatemala. A teen summer leadership conference. A provocative essay. (Never mind that many schools have used these subjective indicators as cover for years to disguise racial profiling in admission decisions, and one is now dragged before a Federal Court.) But better not explore too much. Not actually work two years in Guatemala. Not actually enroll for a semester in Delhi. Certainly nothing that would disrupt the pathway from high school to competitive (Oh please! Oh please! Pick meeee!!) enrollment at a single, in-residence, 4-year college.

Embarking on the journey

Teen exploration is a Panda Express version of a real thing that’s abundantly available all around us, made of real stuff, and infinitely cheaper, too.

If I should get comfortable working, living and cooperating with people very different from me, why don’t I get a job at McDonalds? Or cleaning restrooms in my nearest airport? Why not extend that volunteer work in a faraway country long enough to really make a difference? Why do we instead count on the army of admissions officers and their opaque selection model to place me with people who will supposedly broaden my worldview?

If I should learn to learn, then why is the process administration-led and not student-led? Why should I only take classes during defined intervals and only from this one school? Why shouldn’t I pursue the topics that interest me most from the sources (whether it’s Udemy or Masterclass or another university or person) that deliver the most value to me?

If I should explore, then why is there a required curriculum? And even as critics point to the erosion of supposedly “essential” education toward trendy, preachy progressivism, administrators still dish it out like a pre-set menu: so many credits of race and ethnicity, so many credits of foreign language, so many credits of social science… Why is my path so mechanical and contrived? Wasn’t Picasso exploring when he dedicated years of his life to the color blue? How have we become such bean-counters about exploration?

What you won’t hear ivory tower-defenders admit is that the ivory tower itself is a business model. And a very illiberal one. Excessively complex and untransparent selection. Bloated administrative function that poses to ensure diversity and uphold fragile identities while driving up per-student costs. Bundled product that raises switching costs and leverages simplistic HR systems (highest level of education= drop-down menu) to over-price a product that costs far less in unit-form. Inflexible product terms and conditions (e.g., timing of course availability, core requirements) that always advantage the seller. Indirect subsidy distribution and third-party payment schemes (think Sallie Mae and American taxpayer) that limit buyer incentives and information for true price comparison. Final price tag double the median household income.*

So if the goal is broadening my horizons, then why should I go to college? If I am the most liberal, liberal arts student, then I should grab my backpack and head for an internship far away. Tuck Jack Kerouac under my arm and hop the next Greyhound. Hook up to Udemy and Coursera from the sofa where I end up sleeping tonight. Show up on some college campus not starry-eyed and contractually bound,

Thrilled!!!

not primed by some elite, inaccessible process, not riding on mom and dad’s home equity line of credit; but with twenty bucks, a backpack, and a one-click sign-up for the course that interests me. And a few years from now, my mix-and-match courses, my pasted-together knowledge and experiences shouldn’t wear like a stigma on my first big job interview, but should be a legitimate and understandable credential to the HR blockhead. That would be a real liberation.

Be wary of those who defend liberal arts from inside university campuses. There’s a business process at work that’s sifting, sorting and stamping the foreheads of over-eager teens (Louis Vuitton! Prada! Gucci!) while pretending to celebrate learning.


*U.S. median household income, 2016, acc. U.S. Census Bureau was $57,617. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/acs/acsbr16-02.pdf
In 2017-2018, the average cost of 4-year undergraduate tuition and fees was 2018 school year was $138,960 at private colleges, $39,880 for state residents at public colleges, and $102,480 for out-of-state residents at public colleges. https://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064

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.

Agency Makes Boys Manly, and that’s a toxic word

What is agency? Agency is having and exercising the power to do the things you want to do. It is more than the wrestling of a man’s rational and passionate selves. It is also what Hegel called his thymotic self, what Nietzsche called his demand for dignity, what Fukuyama described as his demand to be recognized and to assign value to things. Man has agency when he not only has the cognitive faculty of decision-making, but has a full chest. He decides what is moral, valuable, useful, and acts accordingly.

What is not agency? I recently asked my brother if he thinks his 13-year-old son has agency in learning, and he told me (rather defensively) that he most certainly has. There are electives at school,

and he has selected orchestra and Spanish. Will you wear the blue shirt or the red shirt? is not agency. Will we start with math or Bible? is not agency. These are pretending at agency in an environment of pre-determined opportunities and potential outcomes. And while stylized choices make a good practice for smaller children, a few years later, they insult the emerging man.

What turns a boy into a man? 

I ask this question anticipating the now-ubiquitous prickly response to these words. Man. Manly. Before Harvey Mansfield and a resurgent social movement had to reclaim manliness, I was trying my own experiments on our pre-teen sons. My husband was away for months at a time in Army training, becoming a Ranger, and then deploying to Iraq. I worked among international professionals who shot condescending remarks at the always-pregnant American mom whose husband believes in fighting terrorism. And I sensed that my boys were on the brink of something alien to me, something that would take several leaps of faith to find. 

She's a bad mother.

Nobody applauds the mother-bird when she throws her young out of the nest, especially if he tumbles and falls. We reserve the worst judgment for her. We’re ready to applaud when he soars splendidly upward, but we close our eyes to the awkward process that brings this about. So, too, with the minute-by-minute coordination of kids’ time; hundreds of permission slips; opt-outs for PG movies; zero-tolerance policies; and the de-risking of kids’ playgrounds. I looked around me at other Army children--pudgy, hypo-allergenic, addicted to video-games--and I wondered, who will fight the next war? (If you’re cringing at my honesty, Condoleezza Rice made the same observation).

So I tried a few things. I didn’t ask anybody’s permission, and to be honest, a lot of this was probably terrible parenting. In Cambodia in 2011, I put our then-11-year-old son up to swimming across the Mekong River in a charity competition with me and other athletes. I sent our boys on an unaccompanied trip to Mongolia to live with a family I'd only heard of through a friend. I left my oldest son in Bishkek for a month in a woman’s apartment whom I had just met to work as an intern for an American company when he was 15. And at 16, I sent him to Shanghai to study, and he got lost in the train station for 24 hours. As the mother-bird watching her chick fall (or not getting any response to calls for 24 hours), I can say this is a really terrifying process.

But I believe that what was kicking-in within my sons’ chests when they fought against the current, or navigated an airport, or found the way to Xinxiang, was an instinctive agency. I will make myself survive. I can figure this out. And I believe that this agency can only be unlocked when there are real choices and real risks.

Now I am guiding the first clusters of teenagers in BreakAway Learning, and we message each other almost constantly. There is a recurring theme. Which online course should I take first? Which biology book should I read? Which pages should I start with? How much should I read today? These are 17 and 19-year-olds. And while I’m glad to make preliminary searches on Udemy and Coursera, to provide the Scribd subscription so that they have access to an e-library, I want them to take charge. Decide which course is more interesting. Decide which tutorial is more helpful. If a book is poorly organized or not captivating, put it down. Overcoming a deeply-ingrained view of education as an externally-applied process to which one passively conforms is turning out to be a very difficult transition for many of our teens. They are trained to believe in an intelligent machinery that has planned their education and linked it to a future pathway, that the utility of content and the promise of later reward are certain. What is required of them, they have been told, is to FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.

The great betrayal: We have no further plan for you

School administrators and the education industry work up to a climax that precedes the fall from the

Tell me what I should do after the clapping, mom.

nest, and therefore, absolve themselves of any guilt when the chick flutters hopelessly down. The boy is reminded to sit still, to keep his hands to himself, to follow directions, to perform when asked to perform. He achieves stylized successes in de-risked scenarios where only a handful of outcomes were possible from the start. If he’s a good boy, he gets into college. In college he takes more classes, including on many campuses required core courses that strive to remold his errant worldviews toward a more ‘socially conscious’ reality that at the same time admits little room for disagreement, cannot be opted-out, and tends to view his emerging manliness with suspicion or downright scorn. The hallmark event is graduation.

But what comes next? Here is the great betrayal. Noone within this self-enclosed system has any relationship to the real world. No one knows what this empty-chested man will do with himself when he is 24, 27, 32. Will he start a small business? Enlist in the armed forces? Marry the girl whom he got pregnant? In other words, will he MAN UP?

How can we expect it, when the words themselves are toxic?