22 Comments

Agree with caveats. But nursing home job I got at 15 (a hard job, a real job, not “work experience” but real labour) was the making of me now, as a doctor.

Expand full comment

Even in the first years of my job, I saw starkly the difference between myself and those who’d only ever known “school work” before.

Expand full comment

This article is really worth reading and touched me personally. Not only as a father, but because as a child I myself had to struggle with the modern school system, found it coercive and restrictive and couldn't find a way out. The way for young people to do something great lies off the beaten track.

Expand full comment

As a teacher of young people, I very much appreciate the point you are making! I strive to see individuality and to ask why we are learning anything. I take your essay to heart.

Thank you for the perspective!

Expand full comment

Agree with so many things, but I don't think mass schooling is a waste of time, nor do I think standardization makes being exceptional that much more difficult than it would otherwise be.

Maybe it is a difference in understanding, but when I think about life before mass schooling, I imagine most children spent their childhoods doing whatever manual labor (e.g., helping in the fields, helping with the family business, running errands) their parents required them to do. Maybe these jobs provided skills that today's children don't get, but I don't think these jobs prepared children for occupations outside of their parents occupation in any meaningful way. I also don't think children particularly enjoyed this work. Whenever you read diaries from children in the great depression, many lamented having to leave school to find work. Obviously, there could be many reasons for this, but I think the simplest is that school is a not-so-bad way to spend your life as an adolescent, and is preferable to many of its alternatives.

I think exceptional children will excel in most environments. School provides these children with 8 hours where their parents, who are otherwise in control of their lives, have no say in what they do. Many of those hours may be spent doing schoolwork, but (at least in the public school I attended) if you finish your work early, most of the time the teachers would let you study or work on whatever you wanted, so long as it didn't disrupt the class. ~90% of children in the US attend public school, where learning is standardized in various ways, yet there is no dearth of exceptional teenagers and young adults who are recognized as exceptional in their fields (music, science, visual arts, etc.) while they are attending public school.

If a parent thinks their child would be exceptional but is being held back by a standardized curriculum, I totally support them finding an alternative means of education. But for the vast majority of children in the US who may not be "exceptional," I think school is a good way to spend much of your time in childhood.

All of that aside, I think your point about agency in children is so important, and think many children would benefit from their parents promoting agency at all points in life.

Expand full comment

Really love this piece- I’m curious, where do you see sport fitting into this? Many kids during schooling years are also training in different sports; youth attend the olympics, win world championships and more (I was competitions in sports at an elite level at a young age, and found it incredibly challenging & rewarding). Most of the examples here are focused towards business/industry

Expand full comment

I think so. It definitely captures a big part of the mastery. I would think it very likely that children who do (competitive) sports are much better at trying things and sticking with them, setting goals, etc.

Expand full comment

Have you read The Last Samurai by Helen deWitt? It explores how to educate children and nurture the precocious - it’s definitely a work of genius and it’s frequently funny:

‘In a less barbarous society children would not be in absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school.’

Expand full comment

Great essay! Im particularly interested in how you're putting these principles into practice with your own children.

Expand full comment

> we risk them coming to see their own lives as mere abstractions.

Possibly the most important line here. When you don't encourage a child to genuinely engage with the world, and seriously try things, you turn him into an empty vessel. You make him think that his entire purpose in life is to work for 45 years in a soulless corporate job that means nothing to anybody, and then retire if he's lucky.

That's not how life is supposed to be. Children need to be respected as future creative adults. Because they are. Or at least they should be. But only if you allow that part of them to wake up in the first place.

Really lovely, memorable piece. One of my favorite essays of the year, and required reading as far as I'm concerned.

Expand full comment

A huge problem is also the loss of the cultural context, institutions, and individual facility for ushering children into the world of useful work. The most obvious of course are labor laws which you mention, but nearly every craftsman in the 1800s would have had experience dealing with the annoyance of extracting useful labor out of an untrained and likely recalcitrant youth, all the while providing instruction in the task at hand. That is literally not a skill that ANYONE has today, and the knowledge has been lost. To be fair, this is also partly a consequence of the abstract nature of modern work which is harder for generally literal minded children.

Probably the biggest disadvantage the modern parent faces though is the lack of any cultural EXPECTATIONS that children should provide any economically useful function. Unless the child is some wunderkid, any parent wanting to adopt your recommendations will have to keep pushing and pushing and explaining over and over again to the child that they want a better life for the child than society wants for them. And the kid would probably rather just do what's convenient and normal, and be able to play video games.

I say all this as a parent who longs for my children to have the childhood you describe in this essay!

Expand full comment

I want my kids to have a fun childhood but I also want them to have the experience that they matter and that their time matters far earlier in life than I did. I agree that it's a hard uphill battle but I hope it's one I'll be willing to fight as my kids get older.

Expand full comment

This was great the first time I read it and is just as good now. Your and Heinrich's thoughts on education and agency have been very influential as I design our own education. It's why I decided to let my son build an airplane when he asked. I'm still formulating my thoughts (and writing about them every week), but reading this helps remind me that I'm on a right path

Expand full comment

Who is Heinrich/where are his thoughts on education available?

Expand full comment

Wonderful post and I agree wholeheartedly.

I got my first job at 13 and an engineering apprenticeship in Royal Navy at 16. I'm doing my degree in philosophy now, in my 50s. I am loving it but I cannot for the life of imagine how it would have helped anybody to get started in life at 18. Aside from a handful headed for careers in law, medicine and physics, most students are just treading water for three years.

I was one of those kids who taught myself to code when I was 13 and after I left the Navy I had an amazing career as a programmer that took me to the City of London, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. I still love programming as I approach 60. If there's a more creative activity, I can't imagine what it is.

The Art of Manliness had a post a couple of years ago that followed a similar theme to yours. It compared the early lives of Steve McQueen, Sean Connery, Earnest Hemingway and others who, between them, served in the Navy, worked in a circus and on an oyster boat and drove a milk float. No one does that any more. I did.

Expand full comment

Every parent (and student for that matter) would be better off if they read this post. Not only are schools failing to teach relevant problem-solving skills, but they are, by focing students to engage in meaningless work, stealing young people's sense of agency and, therefore, chance of creating a life they're excited to wake up for. "Unlike the past, where many smart children finished sooner, modern education endlessly ushers them towards an often farther and more abstract future—one so far away and abstract that some children become infected with the opposite of agency. They take on a learned helplessness and downplay that the future is a reality at all." The more years a young person gives to hypothetical work, the harder it will be for that person to create a meaningful life. It seems almost essential today that to live purposefully, one must take charge of his or her education.

Expand full comment

What is today’s equivalent of becoming Verrocchio’s studio apprentice at 14?

Where are the studios, anyway?

Working at a startup. Building a YouTube channel.

Expand full comment

Great perspective. How do you balance online and offline learning with your own kids?

Expand full comment

I took my 13 year old out of school and took him to Germany to be accosted by gypsy's...

Is this what you mean?

https://open.substack.com/pub/obsidianblackbird/p/my-german-darkwoods-and-mist-filled?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2eehxi

Expand full comment

This is something John Jack Russo would say!

Expand full comment