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?

When the 4-year undergraduate degree stops being “the thing”, will high school have an identity crisis?

There are so many hollowed-out Main Streets in America that one hardly needs to recount the story of what happened when shop-retail gave way to big-box retail. And there is an even uglier asphalt wilderness left behind when big-box retailers bankrupted each other, and then ultimately lost to online shopping. People in small towns still need a Main Street that is about strengthening families, civic engagement, getting outside, and supporting the arts. But in many towns where retail stood in for those goals, its demise meant the demise of greater Main Street, too.

In case you didn't know,
college is the thing to do!

We shouldn’t let that happen to secondary education! Teen learning should be an exploratory and idiosyncratic process. It should be the recognition of one’s place in a historical continuum-- deference and respect for those who came before, curiosity and identification with one’s local and religious community, and an emerging sense of duty to contribute further to it. It should be many brave attempts, numerous failures, and the first glimpses of opportunity.

But in most high schools, it’s not.

The culminating moment. 

Rather, the association with college preparation has become so pervasive that many accept the two as inextricable.

Just as retail is not civic engagement, nor are preparatory classes and obligatory service assignments human exploration and growth opportunities (don’t let those college essays fool you!). Quite the opposite.

For the most ambitious teens, a fixation on grade-point average, class rank, and what “looks good” on a resume squeeze out time for real intellectual exploration (is there really time to pick up a book, even an article, of one’s own choosing?), limit risk-taking, and preempt the budding of a spontaneous, judging, moral self with a contrived, mechanical, inert and compliant self that ticks off the boxes of grades, sports, and volunteerism.

For teens that don’t show ambition, struggle with behavior, or admit that they’d rather be someplace else, high school is an externally-applied machinery to which they are subjected for 7 hours each day. And that raises a million other questions that we should be thinking about. Is conceptual dialogue meaningful, even possible, when forced against the participant’s will? Is there a point to content recollection when it’s almost immediately forgotten? Is the effort to achieve measurable, standardized results placing an abstract social prerogative ahead of the human being that’s subjected to this process? More simply, if you were forced to sit through this against your will at age 40, would you resist?

And yet we not only accept, but endorse high school’s current role. Why? Because it is preparing a generation of teens for college-- that great ‘transformative’ journey of lectures, projects, parties, sex and debt sewn into the quilt of American coming-of-age. High schools measure their worth on the percentage of graduates heading to 4-year colleges. They adorn their entry halls with commendations of the college-acceptances of their seniors. The whole junior and senior curriculum is built around college prep and advanced college credit. Counsellors, teachers, and administrators strenuously shepherd wavering teens back into the flock, moving forward in unison toward one certainty. The thing to do is college.

But what will happen when college is no longer “the thing” to do?

There are predictions of a college enrollment implosion and of a slow decline. Personally, I think if we are to take cues from the housing sector, we’ll see a loss of confidence in securitized student loans, a shake-up of political commitment to Sallie Mae, a spike in student loan interest rates and further defaults. We’re already seeing the rise of microcredentials, loss of distinguishing value in a Bachelor’s Degree, multinational recruitment and distribution of tasks across an increasingly anglophone world talent population. None of that bodes well for the last sheep to be herded toward American college admission, and what today averages $36,000 (public in-state), $100,000 (public out-of-state), or $136,000 (private) for four-year enrollment.

What could the “next thing” look like? I think it will be 18-25 year-olds who continue studying on Coursera and Udemy and other coursewares to achieve specific skills targeting work opportunities that they are undertaking in parallel. I think it will be young people living from one Airbnb to the next in shared spaces in large cities. I think it will be a blending of micro-credentials and internships, whereby those who invest the most in social networking, build their LinkedIn referrals and recommendations, demonstrate jobs well-done and connect themselves to promising projects will emerge with more opportunities. I think teams will increasingly form around temporary projects, but the breadcrumbs of their shared interests and positive feedback will contribute to new forms of validation, more timely, specific and discriminating than undergraduate alma maters. This has the potential to be hugely empowering to brilliant, hard-working people from very low-income backgrounds, at the same time that it’s horribly unsettling to the parents of low-ambition, go-through-the-motions teens from middle-income America.

[Don’t get me wrong, professional certification will still have its role. Surgeons, dentists, operators of heavy machinery, and hundreds more job classifications will require special training in state-accredited programs, culminating in tests and certification. But the presumption that the 4-year undergraduate degree is the precursor to such specific study will be broken.]

Which brings me back to high school. It’s one thing to turn one’s tassle, take a life-guarding job for the summer, and self-importantly drive off to University X in September. Administrators and parents applaud a job well done, and dust their hands of another class. But it’s something very different to factor quadratic equations one day, and struggle to self-network, set up temporary domicile, build reputation and secure health insurance the next. John Knowles expresses nostalgia for those last months of adolescent boys’ innocence, awaiting a WWII draft in A Separate Peace. For today’s young people, it’s not so much a leap from innocence, as an incompetent, self-absorbed, and morally empty tripping into a hyper-cost-conscious, commoditized, automated, decentralized, transient, unforgiving reality, to which their “preparation” has been exactly wrong. For those touted as the brightest students, the narcissistic emphasis on self-enrichment, individual achievement, and stylized pretending at community engagement instill attitudes and behaviors that adults would find abhorrent to work with in a team, to manage as an employee, or to be married to. For those that endured, rather than enjoyed high school, it’s hard to say what could have been of those years. Dreams, creativity, rebellious spirit and outside commitments have been hollowed out by a relentless daily process into which those things didn’t serve any purpose. They will have to recover and rebuild a part of their intrinsic selves. Young adulthood will not consist of gym coaches, history tests and algebraic equations, after all, but the potential energies of these students will have to be discovered from scratch.

I know I’m making gross simplifications. I know that numerous teachers are reaching above and beyond to identify students’ special capacities, to encourage extra-curricular projects and increasingly to train in vocational skills. But here’s the point. These are added-onto a thing that is called high school, where pre-defined curricula, standardized testing, arbitrary timing, and college prep are at the core. My argument might come across as a No shit moment, but it’s precisely because we accept these things as the DNA of high school, that high school cannot adapt to what’s coming.

So what comes next? I believe that an alternative model for teen learning is emerging at the periphery. Homeschooling was the first wave, but the mainstream looked at is as inaccessible-- too demanding of parents, too nerdy, too weird. Even among homeschoolers, few continue through the teen years, and very few take a try-and-see, exploratory approach (the most common posting on homeschool Facebook groups, I think, is “Can anybody recommend a curriculum for my xx-year old?”). But the very small try-and-see group is onto something. Their teens remain close to their parents, follow social and political issues, read books out of curiosity, visit foreign universities, speak multiple languages, intern at real jobs, participate at their churches, and volunteer when nobody is keeping track.

I believe we can learn from and expand this approach through a million local efforts in families, community groups, churches, synagogues and mosques.

Learning cluster in Kabul,
Afghanistan. Learn more about them at:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/
breakaway-learning-project-
kabul-kids/x/17612837#/

I believe that a new format called “cluster learning” will foster thoughtful, creative, and brave young people from the roots of parents, pastors and mentors. They’ll meet in living rooms and coffee shops and church basements. They’ll be a tangle of laptop chargers and headsets, a jumbled bunch of different-aged young people reading and skype-chatting with tutors and taking online courses, in between talking with their supervising mentor, or playing frisbee together at the park. They’ll come and go some months studying, and some at a homestay in another country, at an internship or visiting a university campus.

This learning cluster in Bo City, Sierra Leone,
is still short of furniture, but students are pretty happy
to be working with tutors and mentors,
taking university-level courses and one-on-one
chats for $24/month.

It won’t look like much, and it might take a few more years than high school, but each one will be navigating her own path, racking up her own kind of credentials, and moving eyes-wide-open into the new adult reality.

Defenders of high schools have already tried all means of discrediting this movement (religious fanatical, neo-conservative, anti-diversity, etc), but it won’t help their identity crisis. And when some states introduce vouchers, the exodus of the brightest, most self-disciplined and motivated students toward cluster-learning will strengthen the perception that public high schools are behavior-management facilities. Their adherence to group-management and an outcomes-driven approach will deepen their alienation from individualized learning, as their identity crisis goes from bad to worse.

Could high schools be saved from becoming the next shuttered Main Streets? Yes, but like Main

Don't let these become another
asphalt wasteland.

Street retailers, a massive and irreversible dislocation is coming. Unless states can loosen rules governing standardization and outcomes-focus in secondary education, high schools themselves

Maybe time for another sofa.

will have to stop being high schools in order to be relevant. If they can reinvent themselves, they are local assets that could be re-modeled as smaller, cozier, flex-use spaces offering ready mentors, tutors, wifi, devices and other resources. (Personally, I would prefer a comfy Airbnb space or a coffee shop, but hey, some people dig painted cinder blocks and Lysol-smell).

I hope that the transition can be a productive one, like the small towns that have creatively re-invented their Main Streets. Parents and community leaders should look at 15 and 17-year olds as emerging 20- and 25-year olds. They need choice, risks, and agency in their lives. Because the “next thing” is going to be a lot less comfortable and certain than it was before.

What’s the difference between an identity-verified certificate and course-credit?

It seems like an obvious enough question. Imagine arriving at Walmart and being presented with a pre-filled shopping cart at a price far beyond what you had wanted to spend and containing numerous items you could see that you didn’t want. You could alternatively take your own cart, walk up and down the aisles and select merchandise yourself, and it would cost 1/100th of the pre-fill price to get the products you actually wanted.

Everyone looks up to you when you're
pushing this shopping cart 

Sounds like a ridiculous choice, right? But try to imagine that the pre-filled shopping cart is the socially-prized way to shop. You had to compete through a tortuous and uncertain process to have the right to purchase it, and your family and community congratulated you when you got that chance. It represents belonging to something. It comes with a bumper sticker and a sweatshirt that tell everyone you’ve got this cart. And it’s so overpriced and laiden with unnecessary extras, that it seems like only people of a higher caliber are pushing this kind of cart around. 

If you’re the parent of a 16-18 year-old, you know what I’m talking about.

Not that a la carte shopping in higher education is anything new. Udemy was founded in 2009, Udacity in 2011, edX, Coursera and FutureLearn in 2012. Identity-verified course certificates soon followed, along with subscription-based specializations. Technology that tracks students' eye movements holds promise to improve student engagement and identity-assurance. The potential unbundling of how young people study, explore and certify is more than six years old, but the preference for the pre-filled shopping cart stubbornly remains.

Let’s consider some prices. University of Michigan offers a 5-course specialization in Applied Data Science with Python on Coursera. With each course fairly intensive and requiring 4 weeks, let’s assume equivalent of 8 “credit hours” for the whole specialization. Coursera offers the first 7 days free, and then charges $49 per month to continue. So that’s just under 250 bucks. On campus in Ann Arbor as a part-time undergrad in the Computer Science Department, you’d pay $6,832 as a Michigan resident and $17,880 as a non-resident for those 8 credits (you’d save only slightly by enrolling full-time). MIT, the incubator of edX, has put a huge stock of courseware onto MIT OCW for free. But 8 credit hours physically in Cambridge, MA would cost just under $25,000. The student could also have chosen Codecademy, Hackerrank, or Udemy as pathways to mastering Python and machine-learning, making great strides for well under $100.

The continuing preference of families/government/large employers/schools/communities that teens should be channeled toward a 4-year undergraduate degree based on competitive selection, full-time enrollment, and single-institution loyalty seems like an irrational consumer decision. But its persistence shows us how powerfully social cues drive our behavior. The fact that University of Michigan, Yale, Harvard, MIT and scores of other high-priced universities give away their course content free or nearly free, indicates how strongly they expect young people and future employers to differentiate an online, identity-verified course certificate from “credit,” and that from “degree-granting credit”. High schools establish the basis for this difference with Advanced Placement tracks, usually a very narrow selection of courses promising potential college “credit” if students perform well on exams. The same credibility is not given to an identity-verified certificate from any of the thousands of online university courses that a teen might take. The message is clear: those courses “don’t count”.

This view is underscored in American education policies. A 2017 Brookings study examines high-performing secondary students in a sample of states where high schools send students to community colleges to take advanced classes not available on their premises. The report concludes that the additional cost is not warranted, and that “the public cost for a high school student to take a three-credit class via dual enrollment was actually higher than if the student waited to complete high school and took the same three-credit class once she got to college”. The use of the term “credit” as a presumed currency deserves greater attention. Why had the researchers not compared the costs of students walking down the hall to an open room with wifi, logging into edX accounts, and taking any one of thousands of university courses, or tutorials on Udemy or Udacity for that matter? The policy implications go further. Families can only apply 529 educational savings distributions to “for-credit” tuition costs (and since January, up to $10,000 per year for K-12 school tuition). FAFSA assesses need-based financial aid of “for-credit” enrollment. Student loans are defined, and interest eligible for tax credit, when applied to “for-credit” study. “Credit” is more than just a word. It has become the underlying justification for the irrational, over-priced product bundle that is the “undergraduate degree”.

Bryan Caplan’s January 2018 critique of the 4-year undergraduate degree should be required reading for parents, counsellors and teens. He takes on the well-guarded myth that college is a transformative experience, repeated ad nauseum in college promotional materials, that it turns young people into critical thinkers or develops a lifelong love of learning. University promoters talk about some kind of alchemy in the classroom where smart young people and brilliant professors get together and "something magic happens" as one university president called it. But Caplan presents embarrassing data about how little effort most students put into it, how little is remembered, how little is applied later, and how overwhelmingly more stock is placed in the diploma-paper than the entire process. 

Understanding our strange preference for bundling makes us ask a few things about our motivations for learning in general. Do consumers find utility in the incremental process-- that is, conversations, ideas, histories, methods, problems? If we saw utility in each of these things, then we would want to assign value accordingly. We would be like cable customers who really want to know whether the phone, data and television plans serve us better individually or all together. After all, who would sign onto a cable bundle that they knew cost more than all the individual parts?

But then again, maybe if we saw value in these things, our teens would already be on Udemy and edX. We’d be inside of libraries more often. We’d be making and doing things that didn’t award “credit”.

But maybe many of us aren’t sure about the value of the incremental learning process, and that’s precisely why we continue purchasing bundles. If that’s the case, then the sweatshirt, the bumper

It feels good to have a college sweatshirt
in this group. 

sticker, the camaraderie of other elite shoppers, and ultimately resting our heads on our pillows at night knowing that our confused/unambitious/uncertain/wandering teen has “made it”, is really what we’re after. 

And that’s OK.

As long as I’m not the one paying for it.